AI Ideas - Food and Entertainment
2023-10-28

I have been thinking recently about quality of life and exciting usages for generative AI, which could benefit us everyday. The first relates to the sector I currently work in, Online grocery shopping. Chat GPT and the like can easily generate a weekly meal plan alongside a shopping list of ingredients. These plans can be customised to be healthy, simple, cheap etc. But coming up with ideas is only part of the equation.

Clearly we are still a fairway from having a robot cook the meal, although having seen videos of Tesla's humanoid robot it might be inching slowly closer.

There are many meal delivery services, either fully prepared or simply the necessary ingredients and instructions to make it yourself. These services are quite expensive and still don't comprehensively cover every meal. I feel a halfway solution therefore would be if you take the shopping list from Chat GPT and plugged it into an online supermarket. Obviously you can do that manually yourself, but I would like to see retailers make an API available for an LLM to connect to and automatically fill the shopping basket with the necessary items. This would save considerable time and money, especially if you find yourself impulsively buying items (particularly unhealthy snacks). If the AI was able to keep your previous orders in its context, additional money can be saved by reusing previous items that it knows haven't been finished in future meal plans. This AI could be combined with a smart speaker device in your kitchen to read out and teach you how to cook the dishes. If you had to change your schedule the

AI could generate different dishes with the left over ingredients or tell you what to get from your local shop mid week to add to the ingredients. One barrier to this idea becoming reality is retailers like to display adverts on their site to influence your purchases and brands want you to see and be aware of their products, which becomes trickier if you have no need to visit their website. Maybe the brands will advertise in the AI, allowing you to substitute items or suggesting meals. In the United States, I feel Instacart is in a prime position to offer this API, as they have managed to standardize grocery shopping across multiple retailers.

The second AI innovation I would interested in having involves Podcasts or Audio Books. The premise being imagine if whilst listening to a podcast you could hop into the conversation, ask questions and interact with the presenters. The AI would be trained on the previous episodes of the podcast to be able to mimic the style and mannerisms of the hosts. Being able to seamlessly interact with what would have been an entirely passive experience sounds incredibly compelling. I think although possible, maybe not quite in real-time, there is still a lot of work before you would be able to have a full conversation without hitting the boundaries of the AI. The task of getting podcasters onboard with the copyright and potential risks of having an AI clone their voice and personality is another hurdle.