Just ahead of the Black Friday holiday shopping season, Google is adding several shopping-related features on Thursday that are meant to use both Gemini and the company’s AI Mode in search to assist with finding items for specific tastes and specific prices.
Google is dividing these new shopping features into “conversational” and “agentic” in order to describe how they work. Conversational is much the same as writing a prompt to Google’s Gemini or in the search engine’s AI Mode: You can ask for recommendations for a product based on an individual’s taste or needs, and you’ll receive suggestions that relate as closely to the request as possible. During an event for showing off these shopping features, one example included searching in AI Mode for a skin moisturizer that’s particularly helpful for the cold winter months. A series of moisturizer options was then returned, and with a follow-up prompt, they can be organized into a chart for comparing details like the ingredients in the product.
While these conversational options can help with researching for items, Gemini’s “agentic” shopping options have tasks that can be assigned to the assistant to help you find items at your desired price. This has price tracking — which is an existing feature — and it will be joined by the ability to tell Gemini to make a purchase should the item you want hit a price threshold of your choosing. This ability to directly make a purchase will launch with Wayfair, Chewy, Quince and select Shopify merchants.
Google’s Duplex calling technology will now provide the option for calling multiple businesses in order to ask questions or find a product at a particular price.
For items that are primarily available locally, Google’s also using its Duplex calling technology in order to call multiple stores on your behalf. An example demoed by Google representatives featured Duplex calling musical instrument stores to find a guitar within a certain price range. The Duplex AI will speak with store employees on the phone, ask follow-up questions and then provide the information in a digest that’s sent over email.
While Google is giving a particular spotlight to its shopping features ahead of the holiday shopping season, rival AI chatbots have also created their own features to improve researching and buying items. OpenAI’s ChatGPT announced its own suite of shopping features earlier this year, and Perplexity has its own shopping features along with a partnership with PayPal.
