by Vas Mylko, Roman Bilusiak
A new Curiosio version has been released. It’s a direct continuation of Fine Tuning v21. Back then, we implemented tuning of very important points & places, and environs around the points. Today we have shipped custom duration per point. If you know you want to stay at some point from 2 to 3 nights you can tune it now, and Curiosio will try to keep that timing while filling the rest of the programme according to the available time and budget for the trip.
Tuning Form
Click on the point-tag in the web form or a point on the route over the map for fine-tuning. Select Tune from the context menu. If you click/tap the same point in the web form or on the map, you will open the same tuning form for the point. Do what’s more convenient for you.
A Tuning Form will open. Below is a look and feel for the points (cities, towns, villages, parks). For now, we implemented Importance, Environs, and Duration tuning. Other tuning options — Curiosity and Style — have not been implemented yet, they are scheduled for future versions of Curiosio. Let’s see how to tune the duration for two points — Baume-les-Messieurs and Lake Geneva — by customizing The Most Overlooked Corner of France trip:
To repeat this exercise open this interactive trip plan, and click the red [Supertrip] button. The web form will be automatically pre-filled for you. Click/tap Baume-les-Messieurs and then click/tap on Duration from the context menu. Set a minimum of 2 nights and a maximum of 3 nights. Curiosio will try to make trip plans with either 2 or 3 nights at Baume-les-Messieurs. Hit the red [Save] button to apply tuning and return. Click/tap Lake Geneva, then Duration, and set 1 night as a minimum and 1 night as maximum. Curiosio will try to stick firmly to 1 night at Lake Geneva.
Curious readers might have noticed the name of the Baume-les-Messieurs famous watches. That’s right — Baume-les-Messieurs has a long horological tradition — a perfect case to present time features in Curiosio. Below are several examples of use cases on how to tune duration for your benefits.
Overlooked Corner of France
Is Franche-Comte indeed the most overlooked corner of France? Open Curious France and fill in the blanks. Let’s do a Round trip, starting and finishing at Lake Geneva. We define a custom perimeter in that corner of France. We want a travel-through point Baume-les-Messieurs. And we want 2–3 nights there. Finally, hit the red [GET TRIP] button. You will get several candidate trip plans in less than 100 seconds.
Here are the four trip plans starting and finishing at Lake Geneva, all within the requested perimeter, and all with 2 nights at Baume-les-Messieurs: plan1, plan2, plan3, plan4. You could further customize any of them by hitting the red [Supertrip] button.
Tuscan Findings
Now, going to Italy. Since v20 you could use Curiosio for web search. We indexed 100,000+ travel stories and articles. You can find something inspiring and then customize it in Curiosio to what you want and need. Let’s search for Tuscan villages…
We tuned Montalcino point to 2–3 nights of stay, and Rapolano Terme to 1 night. We changed the starting/finishing point from Poppi to Siena; and added Poppi at a waypoint. Also, we tuned Montalcino as a very important point, because Curiosio could drop a requested waypoint to better meet other parameters altogether.
Curiosio created 4 trip plans in 38 seconds. Three of them with 2 nights at Montalcino and 1 night at Rapolano Terme, and one with only 1 night at Montalcino and 1 night at Rapolano Terme. Three plans fit into the requested 11 days as a total trip duration.
In the first trip plan, one waypoint was omitted — Brunello. But all requested duration tuning is met, and the overall trip duration is met. In the second trip plan the same situation. In the third trip plan, Curiosio expanded the overall trip duration from 11 days to 12 days, and all requirements were met — all waypoints are present and all duration tuning is in place.
In the fourth trip plan, there is only 1 night at Montalcino while all other requirements are met. You can manipulate with importance to steer the tuning to your needs. You can try multiple times to get more candidate trip plans. Curiosio is computing every time, hence you are getting unique [on the Earth and in the Universe] options.
As soon as you settle on the plan you could export to 3rd party maps for turn-by-turn navigation; to a text editor or spreadsheet for the final itinerary with your remarks. Curiosio is an intelligence assistant and concierge. You are the traveler and the decision-maker. Also, en route, Curiosio could help you to re-plan everything from now & here till the end of the trip taking into account the spent time and burned budget.
In the example above the export of the route was done to HERE WeGo (aka HERE Maps) because Google Maps has limitations on the number of points. All routes with 10+ points are chopped there or become read-only.
Road Trips with Flights
Just a reminder that Curiosio is not only about road trips. You can fly to the country or region of your interest. Then, rent a car there and explore the country or the region. We are focusing on the cars because of our strategic vision for the future of travel:
- Future travel will be Inside the Gadget. The super-duper gadget is a car, with attention-free driving, with augmented reality.
- Car travel gives you ultimate flexibility and personalization. Stop when/where you need to, and resume where/when you want.
- Curiosity & Serendipity. Change of plans because you have to or because you want to. Live the moment, and Curiosio will take care of re-planning.
The progress with self-driving cars isn’t as quick as we want. Even the most awaited gadget — Apple Car — is postponed and postponed. But there are good signals the efforts are still there. Here is an example of the LLM-based attempt to reach autonomy of driving — Ghost Autonomy Announces Investment from OpenAI Startup Fund to Bring Multi-Modal LLMs to Autonomous Driving.
Thank you for reading/skimming/scrolling down there. Now it’s good to navigate to https://curiosio.com v22 to give it a try. Stay tuned and always follow your curiosity!
