Uber introduced a brand new AI characteristic known as “Cart Assistant” for grocery purchasing in its Uber Eats app.
The brand new characteristic works a pair alternative ways. You should use textual content prompts, as you’d with another AI chatbot, to ask it to construct a grocery checklist for you. Or you possibly can add an image of your purchasing checklist and ask it to populate your cart with all of your favourite gadgets, based mostly in your order historical past. You might be as generic as you — “milk, eggs, cereal” — and the bot will make a listing with all of your most well-liked manufacturers.
And that’s simply to begin out. Uber says within the coming months, Cart Assistant will add extra options, together with “full recipe inspiration, meal plans, and the flexibility to ask observe up questions, and broaden to retail companions.”
However like all chatbots, Uber acknowledges that Cart Assistant could make errors, and urges customers to double-check and make sure the outcomes earlier than putting any orders.
It should additionally solely work at sure grocery shops, with Uber asserting interoperability at launch with Albertsons, Aldi, CVS, Kroger, Safeway, Sprouts, Safeway, Walgreen, and Wegmans. Extra shops shall be added sooner or later, the corporate says.
Uber has a partnership with OpenAI to combine Uber Eats into its personal suite of apps. However Uber spokesperson Richard Foord declined to say whether or not the AI firm’s expertise was powering the brand new chatbot in Uber Eats. “Cart Assistant attracts on publicly accessible LLM fashions in addition to Uber’s personal AI stack,” Foord stated in an e-mail.
Uber has been racing so as to add extra AI-driven options to its apps, together with robotaxis with Waymo and sidewalk supply robots in a number of cities. The corporate additionally not too long ago revived its AI Labs to collaborate with its companions on constructing higher merchandise utilizing supply and buyer knowledge.
