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Comment by ben_w

1 day ago

Alexa never became a good shopping portal because voice interfaces regularly mishear you, so there was always a lot of doubt about what it might be ordering, and also has anyone except the obscenely rich ever gone "yes, the first result, that's always fine, no I will not bother looking at any of the prices on any of the results"? Hence the joke about the reason why Amazon bought Whole Foods being that Bezos said one day "Alexa, buy me something from Whole Foods" and Alexa mishearing it as "Buy Whole Foods".

LLMs are not limited to voice interfaces. You absolutely can use ChatGPT as a search engine if you want to: it does give you results you can compare, telling you about pros and cons of various options, and you can discuss with it what your end-goals are and have it turn a vague idea into a shopping list (that may or may not be complete for your project).

I don't have any reason to think these are the best, ChatGPT is not a storefront and OpenAI does not have a long history as a search engine, but it absolutely can be used this way.