In the past two months, I’ve been traveling through South Korea, Qatar, and Turkey. Along the way, I found AI tools surprisingly useful and want to share a few practical ways I’ve been using them. It feels like we’re witnessing a kind of paradigm shift in how we travel.

1. Menu and information

This has been the most frequent use case — I use it almost every day! In the past, Google Translate could really solve a lot of problems, but in more complex contexts (e.g. hyper-local restaurant menus), Google Translate often produced strange or inaccurate translations. With ChatGPT, it usually understands the context and gives a much better result. Even more, it can explain what the dishes actually are, giving me a much deeper understanding.

I also visit the supermarket frequently. When choosing food, I can easily check the ingredients (e.g. protein, fat, carbs) and learn how to cook vegetables I’ve never seen or used before.

2. Culture learning

This has also been incredibly useful! We had never visited an Islamic country like Turkey before. We knew very little about the culture, objects, and history related to Islam. When we were interested in an item in the museum, we could ask ChatGPT to learn more about its historical background. Or, when walking down the street and noticing unfamiliar landmarks, ChatGPT often gave us reasonably good explanations.

For things like an unfamiliar air conditioner, washing machine, or dishwasher, sometimes with no English instructions. We simply took a photo to ask ChatGPT. It usually recognized the model and explained how to use it. There were several times it even helped us troubleshoot error codes.

3. Communication

We usually search for apartments on Airbnb. While its chat system offers built-in translation, sometimes it doesn’t work well. When we were in Korea, some hosts only used Korean, so we would copy the conversation into ChatGPT to generate a fluent and polite response. We also double-checked the AI-generated text with Google Translate to see if anything needed adjusting. This was especially helpful when we encountered unfamiliar languages like Korean or Arabic.

We also used ChatGPT to learn some basic local phrases like ‘Hello’, ‘Good morning’, ‘Thank you’, etc., to show respect. Locals were usually happy to hear that.

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Although ChatGPT does make mistakes, my feeling is that about 20-30% responses don’t fully answer my question. And even in otherwise good responses, about 20-30% content is not correct. But I think it is really helpful that it provides enough useful insight to help me most of the time.

Another area that requires special caution is legal information; one should be very careful to verify the legal information. One time I used ChatGPT to plan the trip, it suggested visiting Georgia, which does not recognize Taiwan passports.

So far, I feel that the way to travel now is very different from before. In the past, we needed a tour guide to explain the local stories or communication. Now with ChatGPT, I can absorb the knowledge when I’m ready and curious. For example, in the past, when we went to a place, the guide might start telling stories about the place before we had settled into the experience yet. Now I can learn the knowledge at my own pace. The autonomy and depth have greatly improved.

I feel so lucky to be living in this era. I genuinely recommend everyone to travel with AI.

Originally posted in Chinese on Facebook in June. We’ve continued traveling through many more countries, and continued using AI along the way :)