Instacart Announces ChatGPT Plugin to Power Conversational Shoppable Recipes
The wave of ChatGPT integration announcements is starting, and this week Instacart released its first attempt to tap into the productive AI zeitgeist with the launch of its ChatGPT Instacart plugin.
The plugin, detailed in a blog post by the company’s chief architect JJ Zhuang on the company’s website, allows Instacart users to request recipe advice and guidance using natural language through ChatGPT. From there, the OpenAI-powered chatbot will respond with a recipe suggestion followed by a prompt telling the user that Instacart can turn the recipe into a shopping list.
In the video below, you can watch a fish taco recipe magically transformed into an affordable recipe via ChatGPT.
News of the new plugin comes after OpenAI took a dig at Instacart earlier this month when it announced the release of its developer APIs to integrate ChatGPT into their apps. In the announcement, they revealed that they were thinking of the same Instacart fish taco recipe that was featured in this week’s news.
To use the new plugin, users must log into ChatGPT and look for the Instacart icon under enabled plugins. The plugin is only available to paid ChatGPT Plus subscribers, but Instacart says they and OpenAI plan to make it available to all ChatGPT users “in the coming weeks.”
One interesting detail in the announcement was the mention of what security features the Instacart team has built into the plugin. From the post: “At Instacart, we know that the big language model technology is in its early stages, so our ChatGPT plugin is a custom, delayed tool that will only be activated to answer questions related to ChatGPT related to food, and people won’t be able to use it for non-recipe related tasks.”
This means that the company wants to ensure that people use its plugin only for content related to food and not trying to find, say, write a poem about the good qualities of its consumers or give suggestions about who can choose their favorite baseball team. That said, ChatGPT is a little unpredictable, and there’s always the chance that a smart query builder can find a product plugin to spot things that aren’t there and pull something off-brand or off-topic, which is why Instacart informs us that they’ll be rolling out the plugin “in thought and make any changes as needed.”
I like the move, but I think adoption of the tool will likely be limited until we see the integration of the AI tool into the Instacart app. While the announcement doesn’t say when ChatGPT will be embedded within the Instacart app, I’m sure that’s something the developers are working on.
In retrospect, it is clear that food retailing will be one of the most effective sectors to incorporate productive AI, and not just ChatGPT. Earlier this week, I wrote about the launch of a new AI productivity platform called Open Quin. Launch Quin’s first direct grocery shopping app, where users can ask for food guidance in natural language.
