Let AI do the hard parts of your holiday shopping

https://blog.google/products/shopping/agentic-checkout-holiday-ai-shopping/

by ChrisArchitect • 8 months ago

20 59 8 months ago

blog.google

SoftTalker5• 8 months ago

"you can save time by asking Google to call stores on your behalf."

I might have to make popcorn to watch the fallout on this idea.

ratelimitsteve• 8 months ago

i'm still waiting for the first recording of an interaction between two AIs that each think the other is a human

Hello and greetings! I am a customer at your store and would very much find it ingratiating if I were to purchase a gift for my mother -- a piece of jewelry or a small trinket would be great.
Hello! What a wonderful idea! Let me see what's available in our inventory. Would you perhaps like an ottoman, or some floor mats for her car?
An ottoman is a great suggestion! It is not, however, a piece of jewelry. One could potentially call an ottoman a trinket as there is no clear definition of "trinket" that eliminates small furniture.
You're absolutely right! Floor mats may be jewelry but an ottoman is not!

etc...

bryanrasmussen• 8 months ago

I believe you are looking for the "Annoy Customer Service Bot" and "Bureaucrat Bot" combo discussed here

https://medium.com/luminasticity/services-of-illuminati-gang...

sethops1• 8 months ago

This was promised at Google I/O 2016. Still waiting.

lawlessone• 8 months ago

as someone who used to work in a store, i think i'd cry.

One old lady/man calling to ask if we can hold something, completely fine, happy to help them.

100s of able people making the phones unusable with calls they would never make if they had to do it themselves, unsustainable.

encom2• 8 months ago

As someone who also used to work in a store, I'd just hang up. I barely had time to answer the phone most days, ain't got time for this bullshit.

alsetmusic• 8 months ago

I already told my loved ones to stop getting me gifts for my bday / holidays a few years ago. I have everything I want that wouldn't be obscenely expensive and in poor taste to request. Whatever people got me ended up on a shelf or in a drawer and was just a waste (with a couple of rare exceptions when someone made / crafted me a gift, and then it's really wonderful).

I can't imagine how useless an unthinking AI would be at this when my own family and friends who, and this is important, _know me_, can't find anything to get me that doesn't land in the above categories. I wouldn't have expected gifts to be a source of AI resource waste, but I must not be very imaginative.

amelius• 8 months ago

So true. Note that advertising also makes us over-consume.

Technology is great, but it's also great for greedy people.

hathawsh2• 8 months ago

While I agree with you in principle (people should do their own thinking if they want gifts to be genuine), I thought I would go ahead and see how well Gemini can advise someone on choosing a gift for you.

https://gemini.google.com/share/88b694a09a89

The advice seems very good. What do you think? A donation to EFF or an open source project, a rare book, or handcrafted headphones seem like a good start for someone who can't afford anything extravagant.

PcChip• 8 months ago

Handcrafted headphones? I’m interested…

foobarian3• 8 months ago

handcrafted headphones

"I wound the coils myself!"

AndrewKemendo• 8 months ago

This seems like a really solid list

Also people keep confusing the response in the table because they are missing the “or”:

Niche Tool or Sensory Item (Headphones)

It’s not suggesting building headphones

foobarian3• 8 months ago

I just train my family/potential gift givers to only consider consumables. That takes care of the clutter problem.

parpfish• 8 months ago

consumables are the way to go. as a receiver there's no long-term clutter or obligations.

and depending on the type of consumable, there's the possible of getting to share/partake in it with the gift-giver and you've turned your consumable-gift into a no-obligation experience which is another nice type of clutter-free gift.

soco• 8 months ago

I have heaps of jams, honey and candles. There are limits to the consumables as well. That, or people could think about diversifying consumables - although a lettuce head won't bring much Xmas spirit.

carlosjobim4• 8 months ago

Gifts are not for your enjoyment, they are for the givers enjoyment.

Don't take your loved ones for granted, because if you keep acting egocentrically towards them, they will one by one get tired of you.

colechristensen3• 8 months ago

Not liking "stuff" culture doesn't make you a narcissist.

Giving for your own pleasure and getting mad when you don't get the reaction you wanted... one of the most narcissistic behaviors is frequently accusing others of it.

antonchekhov• 8 months ago

[..] I can't imagine how useless an unthinking AI would be at this when my own family and friends who, and this is important, _know me_, can't find anything to get me that doesn't land in the above categories

This is precisely the problem - an AI does not really "know" the recipient (set aside of what it means to "know" someone). The result is you get something just a bit more varied than the usual "He's a Guy - he'll love some Whiskey Stones, a Bacon-of-the-Month subscription, or a Beard Care Kit" advice. (Adjust for whatever target demographic.)

thewebguyd• 8 months ago

Same here. I have just about everything I would want/need. Anything else is niche that I wouldn't want anyone else buying for me anyway (because they don't know enough about the hobby/I want to choose it myself), or far too expensive beyond what I'd be comfortable receiving as a gift from a loved one (Sure, I'd love a Pro Display XDR, no I'm not going to ask anyone to buy me a $5,000 monitor as a holiday gift).

Otherwise, my living and offices spaces are sparse and minimal, I already have all the art, decor, or knick-knacks I'd ever want or need, and I generally despise clutter.

I tell everyone, want to get me a gift? Let's go do something together. Let's go out to dinner, or go on a day hike, etc.

iLoveOncall• 8 months ago

DDOS by Google calls sure is interesting.

ajkjk• 8 months ago

Why do holiday shopping when you can do holiday slopping?

mrtksn3• 8 months ago

What is the point of this? Shopping is the primary reason people work, people love shopping. Not only that, people don't know what they what to buy so they learn in by looking at the options for ideas.

Also, the point of buying presents isn't charity or wealth transfer but thinking about the person.

This is a the case of having a solution looking for a problem.

SoftTalker5• 8 months ago

Maybe I'm unusual but I hate shopping, especially when it involves wandering randomly through a store looking for something that I haven't identified in advance.

I work to pay the mortgage, pay for food, pay the utilities, and pay for other necessities in life. Shopping as entertainment is way down on the list.

11235813212• 8 months ago

Depends on use cases, I suppose. I knew someone with a lot of nieces and nephews. She would buy them all whatever Amazon said was the hot toy that year for each kid’s age. She would definitely shop with AI. A little crass, sure, but real shopper behavior.

mrtksn3• 8 months ago

Interesting but what's the point here? Just give the nephews some money and let them figure out what they want themselves.

thornewolf• 8 months ago

people love shopping

After going back and forth on this many times, I have concluded: some people love shopping and some people hate shopping. Members of one group generally have trouble understanding the other group also exists.

mrtksn3• 8 months ago

I'm member of the group hating to shop for clothes but love shopping most other things.

The reason I hate shopping for clothes is that I don't understand it, I feel overwhelmed and I despise trying clothes on and off. Still, I wouldn't let an AI do my clothes shopping because it doesn't solve my core problem of not knowing what to buy and trying it on.

JohnFen2• 8 months ago

Shopping is the primary reason people work, people love shopping.

A whole lot of people really hate shopping.

Also, the point of buying presents isn't charity or wealth transfer but thinking about the person.

True, which is why I think this sort of tool is antihuman BS. Especially for people who don't like shopping. Someone who I know hates shopping spending time doing it because they want to express how they feel about me makes it an even more meaningful gift. I appreciate a gift someone put effort into more than a gift they didn't, regardless of how much I actually want the thing being given.

scarmig• 8 months ago

Next up: an agent that manages returning impersonal, unwanted gifts and getting a refund. Then, it can delegate to the gift buying agent who can use the funds to buy more gifts!

next_xibalba• 8 months ago

"Behind the scenes, AI does the work for you, calling to see if stores nearby have what you're looking for, how much it costs and if there are any special promos...This feature is powered by our Duplex technology"

RIP anyone who has to answer phones at a store. Also, I'm excited/horrified that Duplex is making an appearance. It seemed like it disappeared after they announced it in 2018.

constantcrying• 8 months ago

What is the points of gifts? For children it is of course obvious why they enjoy gifts, they have no/few other means of obtaining these things.

But why do adult humans, who almost always have the ability to just buy the gifts, give and receive gifts?

I personally hate gifts, but I can imagine why people enjoy giving and receiving them. The reason is that it demonstrates that someone else cared, that they took their time and spent energy for you. Likewise giving a gift is an act of appreciation for the other person for the same reason.

But this also means that the idea of automating gift selection makes the whole thing redundant. What purpose is there in AI gift selection? It becomes just a stupid ritual, in which people spend money to fulfill some social obligation.

SoftTalker5• 8 months ago

Everyone I know eventually comes to this conclusion as an adult. All my friends pretty much have "no gift" agreements with their spouses/partners.

andrepd2• 8 months ago

I give thoughtful gifts. It would never occur to me to order Amazon slop just to mark some meaningless occasion as mandated by social/adbiz pressure.

The missus reads a lot so whatever book she mentioned that she'd like to read is usually my go to lol.

JohnFen2• 8 months ago

For generations, the tradition in my family has been that only children get gifts on holidays. Adults do not (except for gifts given by children to adults).

Adult do give gifts to each other, but not because of holidays. The gifts are because someone saw something and thought "Joe would really love this". They're a way of saying "I thought of you."

leetharris• 8 months ago

It is insane that the thoughtful act of gift giving has been reduced into a checklist item. What is the point anymore?

woeirua2• 8 months ago

Our family stopped doing gifts after it had devolved into just selecting items off of each person's Amazon wishlist.

nkrisc• 8 months ago

If you’re using AI to help you get gifts for people, then you should just stop giving gifts. No surprise this is coming from a company that makes its money selling ads for other companies making shit you don’t need.

Give your loved ones the gift of not giving them more crap.

xnx• 8 months ago

Google is promoting this with a holiday angle, but this is impressive versatile AI agent functionality. With the phone call capability, it sounds much more advanced than OpenAI's similar feature.

barbazoo• 8 months ago

We all love finding the perfect holiday gift, but shopping can often become a chore. Endless scrolling, tracking prices and jumping between tabs — it can feel like work.

It's all so shallow and empty of any meaning. Depressingly lame what consumerism does to our traditions.

TrainedMonkey• 8 months ago

It's hard to avoid putting my sarcasm hat on. There we go. Finally. The AI killer APP. Not only can we supercharge consumerism by automatically buying amazon slop for your loved ones. But there are whole new product landscapes to monetize - the gift slop stream, the shops optimized for AI to buy the gifts from, the ads for the AI optimized Shopify sites, the SEO for the ads for the AI optimized shopping. And there are even new frontiers to disrupt - what if we skip the AD and SEO middleman and pay chatbots directly for traffic. Amazing.

andrepd2• 8 months ago

The circus that neoliberal capitalism puts on to keep the show going...

aurumque• 8 months ago

This holiday season, consider giving the gift of a well-researched gift list, and then letting them decide if they want to buy it or not. Most people don't want more stuff, they just want to know you understand them and care about them.

hdhdhsjsbdh• 8 months ago

As time goes on, tech seems to become increasingly detached from the lifestyles of normal people. AI friends, automated gift-giving, sunglasses you can talk to. Nobody wants this — it doesn’t meet people where they’re at and resolve real friction in their lives — but billions will be spent convincing us otherwise.

Maybe this is a side effect of tech workers themselves becoming more detached from the rest of the population. You are statistically unlikely to get a job at Google or Meta if you were not cultivated from day one as a high-achieving box ticking grinder. Anything that does not contribute to TC maximization is unimportant here. Beauty, human experiences, and other such intangibles are irrelevant in that worldview.

SV didn’t used to be this way; there were all different manners of perspective and smarts, which led to genuine innovation. Now we are dominated mostly by a hybrid of hyper-efficient, paperclip maximizing engineering and sociopathic MBA share price optimization.

woeirua2• 8 months ago

Yet another instance of tech bros trying to automate away the things that humans should be doing instead of trying to automate away actually hard or dangerous things that humans should _not_ be doing.

bcrosby95• 8 months ago

I've never connected with how most people do holiday shopping. "Ill just spend $50 on something you want, and you just spend $50 on something I want, and we'll be done!"

Even more degenerate is "You tell me something I should buy, and I'll tell you something you should buy!" At that point the holidays have evolved into a justification of consumerism.

At that point I just stop gift exchanges. To me the point of holiday shopping is to find something they would enjoy that they never would have thought of getting themself. I know its hard, but isn't that the point? It's supposed to be a time of thoughtfulness not "let me just spend $100 and get it over with".

redmattred• 8 months ago

This circumvents the whole thoughtfulness of gifting thing.

I predict a resurgence in homemade gifts will the eventual backlash to this flavor of soulless consumerism.

Time to go ask ChatGPT what thoughtful homemade gifts I can make for my loved ones.

terramauthe• 8 months ago

I use LLMs to find items for me all the time and it's great. I still have to use my human capacities for consideration and kindness as well as my deep understanding for the people in my life who I care about to suggest what gift I might want to get them. I still need to care. The people in my life have very specific needs and finding the right vendor for a gift involves a lot of searching and reading. Not to mention navigating the brilliant tariffs that have recently made shopping such a joy. LLM tools turn this 3-5h process into a 5 minute exploration.

I'm glad to see this being made mainstream. Hopefully nobody imagines that this will let them care less about people in their lives, since we need a lot more people to care about each other in my opinion.

Olivia8• 8 months ago

It doesn't make any sense, maybe for some people it is a pleasant thing, searching for presents for loved ones, why do someone want to give all the fun to AI? Let it do the boring and repetitive tasks, workflow automation for instance!

Let AI do the hard parts of your holiday shopping

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