Flight tracking?

[groovejumper]

So I went to Build a couple of weeks ago, and when Joe Belfiore demo'd Cortana, he showed this cool feature where she added flight info and automatically tracked the flight.

I can't remember how he did it, and I have a flight next week...

Any ideas?

PS: 920 upgrade went without a hitch new keyboard works great...

 

[ygtgngr]

I also couldn't get my flights tracked. Even though I have my e-tickets in my inbox.

 

[jdballard]

I see the setting in the Cortana settings (Detect tracking info, such as flights...) but as to how to get it to set reminders and stuff? Not sure. I wonder if you book another flight it will add that automatically? Or you could try forwarding the email to yourself and see if that does the trick.

 

[groovejumper]

Yup already forwarded the email to myself, didn't really seem to do anything. I'd book another flight but don't need to go anywhere else for a few weeks yet... ✈

 

[jdballard]

Yup already forwarded the email to myself, didn't really seem to do anything. I'd book another flight but don't need to go anywhere else for a few weeks yet... ✈

Tried forwarding an itinerary to myself and no dice, either. I'll be curious to know how this works.

 

[groovejumper]

So I just went to ask Cortana something unrelated and she asked if I wanted to track my flights. I guess I was just being impatient before...

She mentioned she found my flight itinerary in my email.

 

[jeffreygeee]

I have flights from Delta in my email that she couldn't find, but she could find the ones from United. Cortana playing favorites...

 

[ygtgngr]

I have Turkish Airlines and American Airlines flights but she is not seeing either of them

 

[majortom1981]

give it a little bit. Also they have to say flight itineraries in the subject. Cortana recognized mine but didn't do the return flight.

 

[groovejumper]

So, being a developer, I figured I had to try to figure some of this out. Found some details here, describing how they parse emails for schema.org Microdata - looks like a proposed standard for serializing flight details into an HTML5 document.

So I pulled up my flight confirmation email and took a look through the message source, and sure enough the airline (Air Canada) included the appropriate markup. I'm not sure if Cortana has some sort of fallback parsing mechanism if she doesn't find the markup she's looking for. If not, I guess it's up to the airlines for what they implement.

g.

 

[groovejumper]

give it a little bit. Also they have to say flight itineraries in the subject. Cortana recognized mine but didn't do the return flight.

PS: My confirmation email did NOT say "flight itineraries" in the subject...

 

[jdballard]

So I just went to ask Cortana something unrelated and she asked if I wanted to track my flights. I guess I was just being impatient before...

She mentioned she found my flight itinerary in my email.

Same thing happened to me. It was an itinerary for U.S. Airways and buried in a folder, not in my actual inbox. Impressive.

 

[arrow22]

Cortana failed to find my flight info, so I went to the airline's website (Air Canada) to re-send new confirmation emails - no progress. A day later, I forwarded the same email to myself but changed the subject line to "Flight itinerary" and she finally found and added all 4 flights.

Of course, it could always be a delay in getting the phone to parse through emails, but I thought I would share in case it helps someone out. It's a shame we can't add flight info manually in case it fails. Asking Cortana to track a flight just gets her to pull the information regarding today's flight - not very helpful.

 

[ygtgngr]

I sent forward my itinerary four times, and she didn't get it that day. But today she suddenly realized that I have a flight. Maybe she has a LOOONG refreshing period for checking email and text contents.

 

[Georgi Ivanov3]

She answers at least to the question @When is my flight@, but she couldnt track any of the flights I have in my mailbox. I changed the subject to Flight itinerary but still she doesnt track anything.

 

[Talderon]

Hey all... About this issue.

This is a known issue. The trouble is, every airline or partner that sells airline tickets formats their emails differently. Some put the information in text, others put it in tables, some use images for airlines and some don't.

I, personally, have run into issues where I had a multi-leg flight email come in and Cortana only saw the second leg.

If you tell Cortana "Track United Airlines flight 593", she will bring up the flight details and you can add it to your notebook. The holdup here is that it will only track it for today. We are working hard to get this implemented better and allow tracking for future dates. This is all back-end stuff so we hope to keep improving it.

Thanks for this thread and I'll try and check back in when I have more news.

 

[Georgi Ivanov3]

Is it possible than to show a basic flight ticket confirmation email, that Cortana recognizes FOR SURE? You can add up ur data and see if she would recognize the flight. I know it is maybe pointless for some, but it is nice to see how it works

 

[Talderon]

Is it possible than to show a basic flight ticket confirmation email, that Cortana recognizes FOR SURE? You can add up ur data and see if she would recognize the flight. I know it is maybe pointless for some, but it is nice to see how it works

I'll run a few tests today and see what I can get Cortana to do.

 

[maks327]

For the record, I booked a flight with Southwest Airlines yesterday, and Cortana asked within a couple hours if I wanted her to track the flights (both there and back).

 

[Georgi Ivanov3]

Assuming the flight confirm email is correct for Cortana, does only US flights get tracked or the country is not importnat?