Pinterest has its own AI assistant now (www.engadget.com)

Pinterest launched Pinterest Assistant, an AI-powered, multimodal search and recommendation tool that tailors visual results to users' tastes. Rather than requiring a precise query, the assistant handles open-ended prompts (e.g., “pillows that match my living room decor”) by analyzing your saved pins and boards, comparing them with patterns from users who have similar tastes, and surfacing visually relevant items. The primary interface is a voice-activated mic in the app: the assistant converts audio prompts into filters that scan and rank visual content, aiming to replicate how people shop and browse in real life. For the AI/ML community this is a practical deployment of multimodal retrieval, user-personalization, and collaborative filtering at scale. Key technical implications include audio-to-visual query mapping, leveraging user-curation signals as training/feature data, and potential improvements in discovery beyond exact-match image search. It also intersects with content-moderation and dataset-quality issues: Pinterest earlier labeled AI-generated images and added controls to reduce them, and the assistant could help surface real purchasable items amid AI “noise,” though it’s not a complete fix. Pinterest Assistant enters beta in the US for users 18+, with broader rollout planned over coming weeks and months.