Uber Eats adds an AI assistant to help with grocery shopping

Uber has announced a new AI feature called “Cart Assistant” for grocery shopping in the Uber Eats app.

The new feature works in a few different ways. You can use text prompts, as you would with any other AI chatbot, to ask it to create a grocery list for you. Or you can upload a photo of your shopping list and have it fill your cart with all your favorite items, based on your order history. You can be as generic as you are — “milk, eggs, cereal” — and the bot will make a list of all your favorite brands.

And that’s just to get started. Uber says Shopping Cart Assistant will add more features in the coming months, including “full recipe inspiration, meal plans, the ability to ask follow-up questions, and expansion to retail partners.”

But like all chatbots, Uber acknowledges that the shopping cart assistant may make mistakes, and urges users to double-check and confirm the results before placing any orders.

It will also only work in some grocery stores, with Uber announcing interoperability at launch with Albertsons, Aldi, CVS, Kroger, Safeway, Sprouts, Safeway, Walgreen, and Wegmans. The company says that more stores will be added in the future.

Uber has a partnership with OpenAI to integrate Uber Eats into its suite of apps. But Uber spokesman Richard Ford declined to say whether the company’s AI technology is powering Uber Eats’ new chatbot. “Cart Assistant relies on publicly available LLM models as well as Uber’s own AI suite,” Ford said in an email.

Uber is racing to add more AI-driven features to its apps, including robotaxis with Waymo and curbside delivery robots in several cities. The company also recently It revived its artificial intelligence laboratories To collaborate with its partners to build better products using delivery and customer data.