The Indian Railways is set to roll out a revamped version of the IRCTC website with artificial intelligence (AI) which will ease access to the website and faster booking of tickets, an official announced on Thursday. 

“We are going to completely revamp our passenger reservation portal IRCTC. The final testing is going on and it will roll out sometime in August. This will have many more facilities. This will have easy access and it will reduce the time taken by the passenger to book a ticket,” Railway Board Chairman VK Yadav said on Thursday.

Mr Yadav said the portal will have AI capabilities integrated into it. The portal will help forecast chances for reservation confirmation to passengers based on the analysis of the past data. The AI feature will also suggest options for the routes.

The Chairman said the Railways have finalised the contract for offering content-on-demand onboard the train. However, the rollout has been delayed due to COVID-19 and will be rolled out immediately when the normalcy returns.

Mr Yadav said a “zero-based” time-table, meaning that the schedule and frequency of all time-tabled trains will be revised, is being prepared in coordination with external consultants. 

The Indian Railways will soon be introducing a “hub and spoke” model, where long-distance trains will be connected with several short-distance ones at important stations. According to Mr Yadav, this system will enable a traveller to buy one ticket to travel by two trains.