Microsoft Bing Augments Online Shopping With Generative AI Tools
Microsoft has introduced a collection of generative AI features for shopping online using its Bing search engine and the Bing AI chatbot embedded in the Edge web browser. The GPT-powered AI behind Bing’s chatbot will now create personalized buying guides, summarize reviews, and help arrange price matching for products with partner retailers.
Generative Shopping
The generative buying guide turns search inquiries into miniature documents about the product or product category, with multiple options for comparison and links for purchasing them. The collection is tailored to the specifics of the original request, as seen in the example up top. It’s essentially the kind of SEO-focused shopping guide seen for every season but with more personalized suggestions and flexibility based on what a user searches for.
“Our goal is to bring more joy to shopping—from the initial spark of inspiration to the exciting unboxing experience—by making the process easier and giving you confidence, you’re getting the right item at the right price,” Microsoft explained in a blog post. “Your shopping assistant for the web will do the research for you, using AI to generate a tailored Buying Guide that tells you what to look for in each category, offers product suggestions, and shows the specifications of multiple, similar items next to each other in a smart compare table, so you can quickly compare options without having to click around to various websites. You can also access Buying Guides in the Edge sidebar or in Bing Chat.”
Traditional automated review aggregators might face competition similar to the shopping guides from Bing’s new review summarizer. When asked to summarize what people think about a product, Bing will gather an array of reviews and employ generative AI to condense them into a paragraph with a big-picture look at the broad consensus of opinion. The last new generative AI shopping assistant is called Price Match. As the name suggests, Bing can help users find a matching price for a product by asking retailers Microsoft has partnered with for the service.
“Our Price Match feature continues to work for you, even after your purchase, by monitoring the item’s price and assisting you in requesting a match if it drops,” Microsoft wrote. “We’ve partnered with top US retailers with existing price match policies and will be adding more over time.”
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