Almost a year after its initial launch, Personal Shopping Assistant, a Microsoft Garage project, is adding features and expanding its smart shopping technology to new platforms with an Anniversary Update. Since June 2016, thousands of people around the world have used the assistant to shop smarter, leading the team to expand, iterate, and further invest in the project.
The Anniversary Update includes a new Cortana Skill, making Personal Shopping Assistant the first skill to be offered by Microsoft Corporation in its new Cortana Skills Store, launched weeks before at Build, Microsoft’s annual developer conference. The skill enables users to use Cortana to talk to Personal Shopping Assistant on the PC as well as the Cortana app for Android, iOS, and Windows Phone. Shoppers who have installed the assistant’s core browser extension experience as well as the skill can say “Ask shopping assistant for my price changes” to hear the recent price changes for their products, or they can recall items they recently shopped for such as by saying to Cortana “My LED TV from Walmart”, for example. Anand Sampathkumaran, Program Manager for Personal Shopping Assistant, is excited about how the Cortana Skill will enable customers to shop in new ways. “We are bringing Personal Shopping Assistant everywhere you shop, and we are making the assistant more natural. PSA is now on your PC, your phone, and all major browsers–and we have more exciting Cortana changes on the horizon.”
“We are bringing Personal Shopping Assistant everywhere you shop, and we are making the assistant more natural. PSA is now on your PC, your phone, and all major browsers–and we have more exciting Cortana changes on the horizon.”
Cortana is not the only new place Personal Shopping Assistant fans can engage with the assistant; Personal Shopping Assistant is now available for Facebook Messenger. Shoppers can add the shopping assistant to their Messenger contacts from the assistant menu on the browser, or simply send a message, to chat with the assistant and recall their shopping on the go. The bot can also engage in conversations about products and even feedback about Personal Shopping Assistant and shoppers will get automatic price change notifications in Messenger.
Personal Shopping Assistant has also added a new feature called Boards to its multi-platform experience. Using the browser extension available for Microsoft Edge, Chrome, Firefox and Opera, shoppers can save and group products into custom boards by clicking on the blue heart-shaped icon that appears on the product web page, and later visualize their finds through their My Boards page on the Personal Shopping Assistant website. There, shoppers can also see offers from other sellers along with their prices where available to stay on top of potential deals.
Personal Shopping Assistant is a project borne out of a customer obsessed, data driven, grassroots effort by a small group of people based in the Bing Marketplace team. The team incubated this project from a deep analysis of the consumer’s shopping journey. In a world of overwhelming product choices and the many ways to shop for them, this Garage project team is on a mission to build an assistant that helps users shop smart and enjoy shopping. As the team expands to new platforms, they are one step closer to this mission, and look forward to continuing to simplify shopping as they celebrate the anniversary of their Garage project launch and look to the year ahead.
