Meet Your AI Shopping Assistant

+ Gemini Finally Learns to Google 🔍

Author

Reyhan Merekar
November 19, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes

In partnership with

Looks like Perplexity just gave your Black Friday an upgrade…

In this edition we’ll be covering…

  • Perplexity’s new “Shopping” Feature

  • A tutorial on how to install the Claude Desktop App

  • Implementing Google’s “Ground with Search” Tool in Gemini.

  • 5 trending AI signals

  • 3 new AI tools you can use today

  • And much more…

Let’s get into it!

Perplexity Goes Shopping (Watch Out, Amazon)

Perplexity AI is stepping into the e-commerce ring.

The tool is expanding its capabilities beyond information retrieval with a new shopping assistant for users to streamline shopping sprees!

Here’s where things get interesting:

  • This new feature mixes Perplexity's trusted AI with real-time pricing, detailed recommendations, and expert insights.

  • Shoppers can also upload photos alongside text entries to find specific items, similar to Google’s visual search features.

  • Merchants can enroll to improve their product visibility and gain free API access for powering searches on their websites.

You can put it to the test by using the prompt from the video above: 

I want to build an indoor library. Help me find all I need to buy.

So What?

The AI shopping wars are heating up faster than a Black Friday sale. While startups like Daydream, Deft, and Remark duke it out with Amazon's Rufus, they're all trying to turn "you might also like" into "I actually know what you want."

But here's the real challenge: these AI shopping assistants need to prove they're more than just glorified ad engines with fancy algorithms.

Trust is everything in this game, and avoiding bias isn't just about keeping regulators happy – it's about building something shoppers actually want to use.

Together with: Codeium

Unlock Windsurf Editor, by Codeium.

Introducing the Windsurf Editor, the first agentic IDE. All the features you know and love from Codeium’s extensions plus new capabilities such as Cascade that act as collaborative AI agents, combining the best of copilot and agent systems. This flow state of working with AI creates a step-change in AI capability that results in truly magical moments.

Tool Spotlight

Meet Your New Desktop Buddy - Claude

A few weeks ago, Claude went from cloud nomad to local resident with its shiny new desktop app.

This app has been a go-to for me and is super snappy on Mac.

Here’s how you can install it yourself and unlock a seamless experience:

  1. Visit the Claude Downloads page and select the option to download the appropriate installer for your system. 

  2. Run the installer and follow installation prompts.

  3. After installation, locate “Claude” in your list of applications, and click on it to launch the application.

  4. Sign in and chat away!

And voilà! You're now running Claude straight from your desktop, no browser tabs required.

🔥 Pro Tip: Similar to the ChatGPT desktop app, you can use a keyboard shortcut to bring up the option to chat with Claude regardless of where you are on your computer. On Mac, the keyboard shortcut is Option + Space whereas on Windows, you can use the Ctrl + Alt + Space keyboard shortcut.

Industry Intel

Teaching Google Gemini to… Google

Google announced developers can now ground Gemini in Google search. We covered this briefly a few editions ago, but we figured now would be a great time to teach you guys how to implement it. 😉 

Why is this important?

  • Armed with Google Search, Gemini can now dodge the training data cutoff and serve up fresh, verified info complete with supporting links.

  • This enhancement leverages real-time Google Search data to provide more accurate, up-to-date, and credible responses from the Gemini 1.5 models.

Here's how you can enable Grounding:

  1. Navigate to Google AI Studio.

  2. Go to “Tools” on the right-hand menu, and under that, you will find the button to enable Grounding. Toggle that “On”.

  3. Prompt away on the Google AI Studio UI!

  4. To use it programmatically, you can use the google_search_retrieval tool at the time of chat completion: 

# Example code snippet

import google.generativeai as genai
import os

genai.configure(api_key=os.environ["API_KEY"])
model = genai.GenerativeModel('models/gemini-1.5-flash-002')


response = model.generate_content(contents="Who won Wimbledon this year?", tools='google_search_retrieval')

print(response)

# Response contains `groundingMetadata` with grounding sources, confidence scores, and search suggestions

Quick Bites

Stay updated with our favorite highlights, dive in for a full flavor of the coverage!

Image from: Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola's AI-generated TV holiday ad falls flat with consumers.

Alibaba released Qwen2.5-Turbo and joins Gemini as the only models with 1M token context windows.

ChatGPT can now read some of your Mac’s desktop apps.

Costs have plummeted and abilities increased for GPT-4 over 18 months, per Ethan Mollick.

Big Tech’s AI spending continues to accelerate at a blistering pace, with the four giants well on track to a quarter trillion dollars towards AI infrastructure next year.

💻️ CodeStream - An in-IDE collaboration platform that streamlines code discussions, reviews, and documentation directly within your development environment.

🧞 Guru - A knowledge management solution that captures and organizes information, delivering verified knowledge to teams directly within their workflows.

📓 Deepnote - A collaborative data science notebook that integrates with various data sources for data professionals.

The Neural Network

POV, You DIDN’T ground Gemini in Google Search:

Excessive? Yeah, just a little. We’re curious though:

Will you be shopping with Perplexity this Black Friday?

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