New York City Debuts Multilingual AI Travel Guide Libby

New York City Tourism + Conventions has launched Libby, an AI-powered travel assistant designed to provide real-time, personalized recommendations to tourists and locals navigating the city. The tool officially went live on August 5, 2025, and is accessible via the NYC Tourism website, WhatsApp, Instagram, and over 4,000 LinkNYC kiosks over the five boroughs.

Created in partnership with Matador Network and powered by its GuideGeek platform, Libby delivers tailored itineraries, neighborhood tips, and activity suggestions in more than 60 languages. Users can ask Libby for ideas on where to eat, what to see, or how to spend a weekend in the city—with results dynamically adapted based on interest, location, and time of day.

Libby draws on a wide dataset that blends NYC Tourism's curated content with over 1,000 third-party sources, giving it a broad, culturally rich knowledge base. The goal: to boost tourism, support small local businesses, and help visitors explore lesser-known areas outside traditional hotspots like Midtown and Times Square.

The launch of Libby follows the January 2025 debut of Ellis, a similar AI chatbot designed for business and event planners. Ellis, also powered by GuideGeek, helped double traffic to the city’s meetings and conventions site within its first month.

NYC Tourism plans to promote the AI guide heavily during major upcoming events, including the America 250 celebrations and the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

AI-powered guides like Libby are gaining momentum in the global travel industry. Similar tools were recently launched in Seattle, Santa Monica, Aruba, Scotland, and Germany. These assistants aim to improve visitor experience and distribute tourism more equitably in urban areas.

Earlier, MakeMyTrip added Tours & Attractions to its booking app to simplify trip management for travelers. Also, Air France‑KLM, in partnership with Accenture and Google Cloud, launched a dedicated cloud-based “AI factory” - an AI assistant to improve airline operations.

Cover photo by Andreas Niendorf on Unsplash