Move over Andy Sachs, Pinterest is launching an AI-enabled shopping assistant that aims to suggest your next look. Beginning on Thursday, and over the coming weeks and months, Pinterest users will be able to talk to the visual platform about what they’re shopping or searching for. The Pinterest Assistant will come back with personalized recommendations based on the user’s saved collections and whatever pins are currently up on their screen, and briefly narrate the results.
The AI assistant is meant to encourage a more conversational experience, Pinterest CEO Bill Ready told The Verge. This is why the assistant only accepts voice inputs from users — and why the assistant will talk back to users when it provides the suggested pins and products. (For now, you cannot turn off the audio narration.)
The AI assistant is an optional feature that is not a replacement for traditional text-based search, which remains unchanged on the platform. Pinterest already uses AI to curate its recommendations to users, Ready said. The voice layer is the new addition to the text and image AI model. “What we’re doing now is making it so that you can actually have a conversation with that,” he said.
During Ready’s roughly three-year tenure, the platform has “effectively become an AI-powered shopping assistant for our nearly 600 million users,” he said, more than half of whom are Gen Zers. The company attracted criticism earlier this year for allowing AI-generated slop to flood the platform. In response, Pinterest began labeling AI-generated images as such and launched a “tuner” feature for users to select categories, like fashion or beauty, that they want populated with less AI-generated content.
Ready said that users are asking longer queries containing more information, which he sees as an indication that they want a more unstructured way of interacting with the platform. A Taylor Swift fan who likes knitting, for example, might not know what they’re looking for or take the time to type out a vague vision, Ready said. “But when it’s conversational, you see people speak very differently than they would type.”
Users can talk to the assistant by holding down the mic button, similar to sending a voice note to a friend. During a demo to The Verge, Pinterest’s director of AI products Ryan Galgon asked the assistant to come up with fashion suggestions based on a Wimbledon poster image. Images of tennis-style outfits appeared on the screen, which the assistant verbally described before offering to search for more preppy or more casual ways to style the fit. Pinterest purposefully chose to keep the audible response concise with a brief description of the recommended pins, Galgon said. The goal is to maintain an experience that is “really grounded in visuals,” he said.
The Pinterest Assistant is powered by a “multimodal” AI model that is “visual-first.” This means that the model can process audio, image, and text, and its output is images. Ready said that the core AI model is built in-house with proprietary “signal” data from users. It also includes some off-the-shelf AI models for basic language processing.
Adult US users can now sign up to get access to a beta version of the new AI feature, which the company says will be made widely available over the next few weeks and months.
Read the full article here
