Shopify’s new Sidekick AI is about to make entrepreneurs’ lives so much easier
Shopify has finally announced how it’s going to implement generative AI into its user experience, and judging by the video announcement from founder and CEO, Tobi Lütke, it feels like a perfect answer to the question, What role should AI play in software today, which we get into in this week’s generative AI roundup.
Shopify is launching an assistant called Sidekick, which Lütke describes as someone deeply competent who is always ready to help, who knows all the tricks in the book, and is fully committed to your success. If it really works as he implies, it may finally give independent retailers the power to go head-to-head against the Amazon behemoth. Or, at least, simplify their lives and eliminate plenty of headaches.
Lütke presents Sidekick as the best business partner you can dream of, with all the knowledge and capacity to help you grow and—reading between the lines—fight your biggest enemy, which often is not other indie rivals, but Jeff Bezos’ juggernaut. Looking at the demo, it seems that Sidekick has the potential to become your full marketing department, ready to answer your questions and take any action needed for your online store.
Sidekick is activated by an icon that looks like Robin (because entrepreneurs are heroes, Lütke says, just like Batman). A chat column then appears on the right side of the screen, ready to answer any questions about your business and quickly accomplish tasks that today consume way too much of business owners’ time.
In the demo, Lütke asks why his snowboards sales are down, and Sidekick replies that it may be because snow precipitation has been going down, showing a graph to support its point. Then, he asks to put all his snowboards on sale and the AI automatically marks down all the prices, changing everything needed on the home page and adding red discount tags in seconds. Lütke then asks to add the surfboard product catalog to the homepage before finally ordering Sidekick to change the entire shop design to reflect surfboards, not snowboards. Instantly, the design morphs from winter ice to summer fire, images and all.
If it works as advertised, this can really be a life changer to any business, knowing personally the soul-crushing torture it is to manage and tweak a shop online. I asked Miqdad Jaffer, the Canadian company’s head of AI product, about how powerful and how deeply Sidekick goes, and he told me that “Sidekick’s uniqueness lies in its ability to understand the specific context of each store and act on behalf of a merchant. With a deep understanding of systems and available data, Sidekick seamlessly interacts with the Shopify admin, enhancing and streamlining merchant operations.” Jaffer says that it will keep evolving, further developing skills and expertise in vital areas for commerce success.
There’s no release date yet, but it seems we will be able to test it fairly soon.
The new video awesome: Pika.art
Runway’s Gen-1 and Gen-2 got some hardcore competition this week. The new text-to-video generator Pika.art seems to be solid and fast, at least according to the video creators who have the invitation-only beta version and are raving about it. As seen in the examples, the video quality seems to be pretty clear and consistent, but you never know until you get to try it.
Everyone says it’s “very fast,” although nowhere real time yet. Here is a reel with examples that have plenty of artifacts and hallucinations but really impressive shots.
The good thing is that Runway has a serious competitor now, which means that the AI video race will continue accelerating. Pika.art seems to be updating its app quickly. (August 03, 2023), the company announced a new feature that allows for “longer and smoother videos up to 5 seconds.” And the day before, it added a new image-conditioned video-generation feature: You upload any image you want, then tell it how you want it to move, and Pika.art will animate it, as seen below. It’s pretty imperfect yet, but it’s really pleasant to watch.
Code interpreter in ChatGPT
The new Code Interpreter in ChatGPT is insane. Now available in beta form to ChatGPT Plus subscribers, Code Interpreter will take any prompt describing an application and make it for you. The feature is a sandboxed Python environment in which you can run any code you ask Code Interpreter to write.
But it’s more than just your personal coder. It can do things like analyze data, create visualizations like graphs and charts or exotic things like getting a scanned bitmap document, and extracting digital text using OCR (you can upload basically any file to ChatGPT for Code Interpreter to manipulate).
No, this is not the end of programmers—yet. For now, this tool can really help designers and creatives who want to quickly build apps and tools as prototypes without needing to have all the technical know-how.
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