[fancyfredbot]

Apparently:

* In App Hotel bookings in partnership with Expedia.

* Travel Mode with suggestions on where to eat and visit when travelling.

* Eats for the way - your driver picks up a takeaway for you to eat while they drive you to your destination.

* Voice bookings using AI and speech to text.

How did we ever live without them!

[burkaman]

> Eats for the way - your driver picks up a takeaway for you to eat while they drive you to your destination.

This seems like the kind of terrible idea that an LLM might have come up with. I'm pretty sure most drivers do not want people eating (especially a whole meal) in their car, and I can't imagine a lot of instances where you're calling an Uber and don't have time to get yourself food, but don't mind waiting an extra 10 minutes for the driver to detour, find parking, and wait for your food.

[jmuguy]

Not to mention what anyone who's worked in an office with a shared kitchen can tell you - the smell getting into a car where an indeterminate amount of people have eaten different meals. Like climbing into a food court dumpster.

[lukeschlather]

> I can't imagine a lot of instances where you're calling an Uber and don't have time to get yourself food

Recently I got a car to take me to the train station and picked up food on the way. Seems pretty common to me. Of course, I didn't need or want it charged as a premium feature in the app.

[newaccountman2]

I have never heard of someone doing that tbh, this is the first time.

[generalpf]

You can get any Uber driver to do it for you if you offer to buy them food too and do it off the books.

[lukeschlather]

You just do a ride with two stops, one at the restaurant, and ask them to wait. It's not remotely clandestine or complicated.

[newaccountman2]

I didn't say I doubted it was possible lol, just that I had never heard of anyone doing it.

[newaccountman2]

Holy fuck, aside from the voice bookings, that's some useless shit to spend money building as far as both tokens and salaries go.

Are they profitable yet lol

[ryandrake]

This seems like the doom of all tech companies that hit a single kernel of a good idea, hire a big development team to build it, and then, once it's running well and making money, leadership looks around and sees this big body of developers, product managers, project managers, QA, and management tree, looking around for something else to do. Then, instead of saying, "Let's find the next big thing to do," they say, "Cram dozens more things into the thing that already works. Anything you can think of, spin up a team of 10 to bolt it onto the main product. Move things around to make everything fit. Run experiments on users to see if this new crap moves the metrics. A/B test to see what we should keep and what we should silently remove next update. Attach this other company's product that we just bought."

In a few years, what do you end up with? The modern version of every single fucking app we use today.

[smelendez]

Well, travel booking is one of those things every company wants to get involved with because it's just straight referral fees. I get advertisements to book travel through my phone company (T-Mobile US) and a slew of financial services companies.

If it's easy enough to add to the app and sticks around for a while, it may well be profitable even if only a small percentage of customers use it or even realize it's available.

[vanuatu]

they are very profitable now!

[fg137]

For context, this is an interview where Uber CEO discussed these ideas:

https://www.theverge.com/podcast/922909/dara-khosrowshahi-ub...

Can't say I am convinced.