Budget airline Ryanair has announced that it is working on a new voice-controlled chatbot for its booking app, which will allow customers to speak into their smartphones to book flights in the future.

Marketing Week reports that the 24 million people who have already downloaded the Ryanair app will see voice recognition features rolled out across the technology in the near future.

As a result, they will be able to book flights in a similar way to how speaking into the Amazon Echo smart device allows people to purchase Amazon products.

Kenny Jacobs, chief marketing officer at Ryanair, explained: "Everything on the website you can now do through the MyRyanair app. In the future, chatbots and voice recognition will sit alongside the app to help our customer offering."

This is the latest example of artificial intelligence being used to transform customer service for a brand, which looks set to be even more common in the future.