TikTok rolls out an AI shopping assistant and one-click checkout

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2:19I'm Emron Shaikh and your Daily Crunch for Tuesday featuring three big tech headlines starts right now. So women throughout history have always sought out relationship advice, whether that's from newspaper columnists like Dear Abby, letters to Cosmo, or just chatting with the girlfriends. In the social media era, you can instead post anonymously on Reddit relationship forums or look to social media creators who discuss the topic. Well, now, two sisters are launching a startup for young women, Hot Girl Hotline, which focuses on bringing AI into these conversations. Now, I know what you may be thinking.

2:56With all the advances in AI technology, founders are building something for women to talk about their dating woes? Well, yeah. The reality is that people have already been turning to large language models, LLMs, via apps like ChatGPT for this type of advice. and the team believes this type of activity should be handled more carefully. You see, unfortunately, as we've all seen, chatting with a general-purpose chatbot about personal topics can sometimes lead to, well, disastrous effects, especially for those who were already mentally fragile. ChatGPT, for example, has faced a wave of lawsuits over its alleged manipulative conversation tactics that plaintiffs say contributed to negative mental health effects, including, in some cases, suicide.

3:41Now, the idea behind Hot Girl Hotline is to reach young women who are looking to have these sorts of private conversations while navigating dating life and relationships, but in a safer way. We're not trying to be an AI companion, explained Byla Mudgil, formerly a social media consultant who co-founded the startup with her sister Sumrin, who studied computer science at Stanford. Mudgil continued, a companion is really going after solving loneliness, escapism, boredom, and you can rely on a lot of emotional dependency from that AI companion. Learn more about Hot Girl Hotline and check out the full article at TechCrunch.com.

4:19Well, ChatGPT is getting more ads. Specifically, OpenAI is adding visual display ads to its ad product lineup so that ads will appear alongside images that users ask ChatGPT to generate. Also, the company is expanding its ad measurement tools and partnerships and developing new ways to determine brand suitability. The new ads will begin to appear later this month in the US only for now and will feature products and services from an initial test group of advertisers. The ads will also be clearly labeled and won't influence the answers ChatGPT provides, the company notes. The move follows the launch of Meta's Muse, an agentic AI app which is free to everyone and a growing competitor for leading AI chatbots like ChatGPT.

5:03OpenAI introduced ads earlier this year to support its free and low-cost subscription tiers and expanded them to India in August. Now, the plan is to woo online advertisers who want to appeal to their potential customers by using more visual imagery to tell their stories. Eventually, those ads will allow them to target ChatGPT's 1.2 billion weekly users once they roll out globally. However, integrating such ads could also prove disruptive to the user experience. But, you know, perhaps that's partly the point, as the ads could push more casual users to pay for a subscription in order to avoid them.

5:39Alongside the display ads, OpenAI said it's expanding its measurement tools and partner ecosystem, which now includes Click Attribution Solutions, AppsFlyer, Triple Whale, Adjust, DV, Rockerbox, NorthBeam, Branch, Singular, Kochava, AirBridge, and Tengen, as well as full-funnel advanced measurement partners Phospha, Measured, and Incremental. OpenAI has also partnered with House, Measured, and WorkMagic to help advertisers explore geo-based experiments around ads. The company said it's working on developing brand suitability evaluation pilots with help from Double Verify, DV, and Integral Ad Science, IAS, which will help advertisers better understand the ChatGPT ads environment.

6:23Combined, the move see OpenAI working to make ChatGPT a viable ad-supported business for those on free and low-cost plans. On Monday, TikTok announced that it's launching an AI shopping assistant and a new in-app checkout feature that lets users buy directly from brands. TikTok describes its new shopping assistant as a conversational AI agent designed to help users discover and purchase products. The company says the assistant understands context and remembers users' preferences and needs throughout the conversation. It offers real-time AI-powered shopping guidance such as product details, shipping information, sizing availability, and help completing a purchase.

7:05As for the new checkout feature, well, TikTok says users can buy directly from a brand from their For You feed, the app's main algorithm-driven video feed, with just one click. The new features could allow TikTok to capture more of users' shopping journeys and potentially more transaction value without sending them elsewhere. By pairing a shopping assistant with direct payments, TikTok's turning its impulse-driven discovery feed into a place where users can get answers to questions about a product and make a purchase on the spot. Now, by building an AI assistant for shopping directly in its app, TikTok also appears to be hoping that users will stay within its platform when they have questions about a product, rather than, you know, turning to outside AI tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT.

7:49The company says these new features are being built in partnership with commerce platforms and payment providers, including Salesforce, Shopify, ShopLaza, and Stripe, among others. The expansion comes as TikTok's influence on shopping continues to grow. According to TikTok's economic impact report that was released last week, activity on the platform helped generate $81 billion in GDP for U.S. businesses, while 54 million Americans said they had purchased a product after watching a TikTok video. And folks, that's your Daily Crunch! Today's stories were reported by Sarah Perez, Aisha Malik, and more awesome TechCrunch journalists.

8:24We'll see you here tomorrow, same Tech Time, same Crunch channel, and until then, find us at TechCrunch.com.

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