Mozilla launches AI shopping helper Fakespot Chat

Fakespot Chat is an AI-powered shopping helper by Mozilla-owned Fakespot. Fakespot is a free service designed to analyze product reviews online to provide Internet users with adjusted ratings. The main idea behind Fakespot is to sort out all fake reviews and ratings; this may change a product's rating significantly.

Some manufacturers, retailers and companies may alter product reviews to increase the popularity of their products. The same techniques are sometimes also used to drop the popularity of competing products on shopping sites. Fakespot uses algorithms to detect these fake reviews.

Fakespot Chat is an AI-powered shopping helper. While it sounds similarly to Microsoft's Copilot Shopping Assistant, it is an entirely different product.

Mozilla's creation is designed to answer questions that shoppers may have about certain products. Lets say you check out Apple AirPods and have a few questions. Do they work on Android? What is the average battery life of the product. How does it compare to other wireless earbuds?

Some shopping sites list frequently asked questions and some questions may also be answered by user reviews. With Fakespot Chat, answers are right at a user's fingertips. Ask the AI the questions and you get an answer, which hopefully is correct and not an hallucination.

Fakespot Chat worked well for the most part during tests. You can check it out on the Fakespot website by pasting the URL of a product into the URL field on the Analyze page. Installing the Chromium extension makes this a bit more comfortable, but you have both options at your disposal.

The AI chat interface opens directly on the product page. Here you may ask your questions. For games, you may ask about the difficulty level, age rating or even if it is similar to another game. For tech, you may ask about technical details, supported formats, battery life, resolution and anything else that you may have questions about.

It is still recommended to crosscheck the answers to make sure that they are correct. When asked about the age requirement of Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Fakespot Chat returned that gamers needed to be at least 67 years of age. When asked again, it returned that there is no specific age requirement. The second answer is correct for the United States, as the game's rating is Everyone there. In the UK, the game has a PEGI rating of 3, which makes it suitable for ages 3 and above. Considering that the review URL was from the Amazon.com store version, the second answer was correct.

One issue that users may have is that the answers may differ each time the same question is asked. This can be a problem, especially if the answers contradict each other.

Closing Words

In closing, it is clear that services such as Fakespot Chat or Copilot for Microsoft Shopping have a long way to go before they become the trustworthy shopping assistant that they want to be. Clearly, it is necessary to double-check anything that the AI's return. This necessity reduces the usefulness of them significantly. After all, you could check the answers directly in the first place using traditional means.

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