Pinterest is launching its first AI-powered Assistant — a collaborative experience designed to transform how users shop and discover products on the platform.

Pinterest Assistant enables users to chat, collaborate, discover, and shop all in one place by delivering tailored visual search results. Pinterest users tap the mic icon and say what they’re looking for and Pinterest Assistant will audibly respond with personalised visual results.

Pinterest says its Assistant solves the “I’ll know it when I see it” problem by providing proactive recommendations that fit a user’s style.

Built primarily on an AI visual language model, Pinterest Assistant uses real-time, conversational descriptors and first-party actions to deliver visual inspiration and shoppable products. It expands multimodal search, allowing context to seamlessly flow between images, voice and text. With voice-enabled conversation, searching on Pinterest becomes even more visual and closer to how people shop in real life. 

“People, especially Gen Z, say that the magic of Pinterest is that it ‘just gets me’, whether that’s finding the perfect outfit or knowing your distinct style,” said Bill Ready, Chief Executive Officer at Pinterest. “With Pinterest Assistant, we’re supercharging that magic by leveraging AI to help our users discover and shop like they would with that person who knows them best.”

Pinterest says its Assistant visual search outperforms off-the-shelf models by over 30% in terms of the relevancy of shopping recommendations and is powered by search data from its 600 million monthly active users.

Pinterest Assistant is starting to roll out in beta to U.S. users aged 18 and over, with wider availability planned in the coming weeks and months. 

Debenhams Group has partnered with Pinterest to increase awareness and enhance discoverability across its brands. While sofa and furniture retailer, DFS, also recently launched an interactive, gamified shopping experience on the platform, designed to encourage product discovery and engagement.