ChatGPT adds shopping: Search, compare, buy with personalised picks

OpenAI adds curated picks and direct links to product searches

OpenAI will now allow users to search, compare, and buy products in ChatGPT by giving users personalised recommendations for products, visual details of the product they are looking for, the price, as well as a direct link to buy it, the company said.

 

In an update being rolled out for all users, the conversational large language model (LLM) will display these product results as an independent search result.

 

“Commerce in ChatGPT is still early, and we’ll continue to bring merchants along our journey as we quickly learn and iterate. These shopping improvements are rolling out on Monday to Plus, Pro, Free, and logged-out users in every market where ChatGPT is available,” OpenAI said.

 

Apart from rolling out the option to search and shop from ChatGPT itself, OpenAI will also roll out its memory integration feature for search and shopping, the company said.

 

“Memory will soon work with search and shopping, which means ChatGPT will consider context from past conversations to help find a better answer for you. We plan to roll this out in the next few weeks,” OpenAI said.

 

In February 2024, OpenAI said it was “testing the ability for ChatGPT to remember things you discuss to make future chats more helpful”. The idea, OpenAI had then said, was to save users “from having to repeat information” so that future conversations with the chatbot became more useful. The memory feature was rolled out to all users in September that year.

 

In an update on April 10 this year, OpenAI said that memory in ChatGPT was now comprehensive, as the LLM could, in addition to memories saved by users, also reference past conversations between the chatbot and the user to deliver more personalised responses.

 

Further, OpenAI will also improve citations given by ChatGPT to include multiple links for a search result to help users learn more and verify the information shared by the chatbot from different sources, the company said.

 

“Search has become one of our most popular and fastest-growing features, with over 1 billion web searches just in the past week. We’ll continue to iterate and improve as we learn from real-world use,” OpenAI said.

 

In December 2024, OpenAI announced the launch of ChatGPT’s integration with WhatsApp, where users could send a message to ChatGPT to get up-to-date answers. 

SMART PURCHASE 

> Conversational LLM to display product results as an independent search result

> OpenAI to roll out its memory integration feature for search and shopping  > It will also improve citations given by ChatGPT

> ChatGPT to consider context from past conversations to help find a better answer, said OpenAI