Perplexity says its AI personal shopper ‘puts you first’

Perplexity is ramping up its AI buying acquisition going into the vacation season, conscionable similar OpenAI and Google, with a free AI-powered buying feature that is disposable present to US users. Its AI adjunct looks akin to what we’ve seen from ChatGPT’s buying research, arsenic users benignant successful what they’re looking for and refine the results with follow-up questions. The recommended products amusement up arsenic cards with specs and reviews, and users tin bargain products straight done Perplexity from merchants that enactment PayPal. 

If you inquire for a overgarment to deterioration connected your commute by ferry crossed the Bay to San Francisco, Perplexity says the chatbot volition retrieve this past enactment to pass its proposal erstwhile you aboriginal inquire for boots. It’s disposable present connected the desktop and web, with mobile entree via  iOS and Android owed successful “the coming weeks.” 

Perplexity says its “Instant Buy” concern with PayPal allows merchants to enactment successful the retail loop and physique relationships with customers, “just arsenic they would connected their ain sites,” possibly arsenic a mode to code what The Verge EIC Nilay Patel has described arsenic “the DoorDash problem.”  

Perplexity’s announcement station takes digs astatine hunt bars that it says “fail astatine exploration” and editorial outlets that “prioritize affiliate gross implicit matching readers to the nonstop products they’ll love” (maybe you could instrumentality a look astatine our Black Friday usher and spot however it measures up?). Online shopping, Perplexity says, tends to absorption connected speedy checkouts, “not the joy” of shopping. Instead, Perplexity says its AI assistants, besides called agents by different companies, “understand intent, retrieve preferences, and enactment arsenic extensions of however users would attack a task connected their own.”