Pinterest unveils AI-powered assistant to enhance shopping experience

Social media platform Pinterest has unveiled its first AI-powered visual-first assistant, designed to transform online shopping and discovery.

The Pinterest Assistant is described as much more than a typical chatbot, but rather an AI-powered tool designed to solve the “I’ll know it when I see it" problem that a lot of people get when shopping, as it has been primarily built on an AI visual language model rather than the typical text model.

Utilising real-time, complex conversational descriptors, the Pinterest Assistant enables users to chat, collaborate, discover, and shop by providing personalised and “proactive” recommendations and shoppable products on the social platform by leveraging the content and actions from its nearly 600 million monthly active users.

The move, it states, is an evolution to expand multimodal search, enabling users to go beyond a simple text search and ask open-ended questions, and allow context to flow between images, voice and text seamlessly.

“With voice-enabled conversation, searching on Pinterest becomes even more visual and closer to how people shop in real life,” adds the platform in a statement.

Pinterest said the new AI tool was designed to be “like a best friend suggesting the perfect new look,” and act as the users “personal collaborator," to allow them to discover, get inspired and shop in one place.

Bill Ready, chief executive officer at Pinterest, said: “People, especially Gen Z, say that the magic of Pinterest is that it ‘just gets me’, whether that’s finding the perfect outfit or knowing your distinct style.

“With Pinterest Assistant, we’re supercharging that magic by leveraging AI to help our users discover and shop like they would with that person who knows them best.”

The AI assistant is meant to encourage a more conversational experience on the social platform, adds Pinterest, as the tool draws from the users' saves, boards, and collages, as well as users with similar tastes, to deliver tailored content to their specific design aesthetic.

The Pinterest Assistant is starting to roll out in beta to US users, 18 years and over, with a wider rollout planned in the coming weeks and months. To talk to the assistant, users tap on the mic icon and say what they are looking for, similar to sending a voice note to a friend. The assistant will then respond with personalised visual results.