ChatGPT now offers a dedicated shopping assistant
With Black Friday around the corner, OpenAI is upgrading ChatGPT's shopping capabilities just in time to make spending your money even easier. Starting today, the company has begun rolling out shopping research, a new feature inside of ChatGPT designed to simplify the process of comparing different products.
The tool is available to all ChatGPT users, including those with free accounts, with the company offering nearly unlimited usage through the holidays. As long as you're logged into your OpenAI account, you can try out the new experience by selecting "Shopping research" from the + menu. ChatGPT will also automatically route prompts it determines would be best served by the new model OpenAI has trained to answer commerce-related questions. For instance, if you type, "find the quietest cordless stick vacuum for a small apartment," ChatGPT will know what to do. 
In addition to comparative shopping, the new experience can help users track down deals, shop for gifts and even find lookalike products. For example, you can snap a photo of a dress and ask ChatGPT to find you something similar that costs less than $250. As you use the tool, ChatGPT will ask clarifying questions to help it narrow down its recommendations. For ChatGPT Pulse users, the tool will even be proactive, generating cards that offer personalized buying guides based on past conversations.
The feature is powered by a variant of GPT-5 mini designed to excel specifically at shopping-related tasks. "We trained it to read trusted sites, cite reliable sources and synthesize information across many sources to produce high-quality product research," said OpenAI. In practice, the shopping assistant should be better at accurately citing product details relative to the company's other systems, including more powerful general-purpose models like GPT-5 Thinking. Still, OpenAI warns the tool isn't perfect.
"Shopping research might make mistakes about product details like price and availability, and we encourage you to visit the merchant site for the most accurate details," the company said. Additionally, OpenAI notes the tool tends to do best in categories like electronics, beauty and home appliances where there are many details and specs the model can compare to generate comprehensive answers.
It's no surprise to see OpenAI expand ChatGPT's shopping capabilities. The company already offers the option to buy items from Etsy from its chatbot, and competitors like Google have been aggressively adding AI shopping features in recent months.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/chatgpt-now-offers-a-dedicated-shopping-assistant-180000034.html?src=rss
