Lazada unveils new eCommerce AI chatbot LazzieChat

Lazada group has released LazzieChat, an eCommerce AI chatbot powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology in Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service to provide a more personalised shopping experience to its customers.

LazzieChat, the first of its kind in Southeast Asia, will answer a user’s shopping queries and act as a personal shopper by offering personalised suggestions and product recommendations based on a user’s queries.

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“By combining the scale and power of Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service with the breadth of Lazada’s consumer reach, this collaboration will transform the shopping journey for Lazada’s customers, sellers, and brands,” said Diomedes Kastanis, CTO for Microsoft in Asia Pacific, in a statement by the brand. 

He added that by adopting artificial intelligence, Lazada will deliver personalised recommendations, enhance the customer experience, provide faster customer assistance, and transform the buying experience in the APAC region. 

Named after Lazada’s friendly lion mascot, Lazzie, LazzieChat is available in English in Singapore, the Philippines, and Indonesian markets, with the latter also receiving a Bahasa Indonesia version with plans to roll out more languages in the future.

“Online shopping journeys are becoming more dynamic with the help of technology. We want to bridge the gap between offline and online shopping by providing high-quality experiences that consumers love and create value for brands and sellers who can tap into new technologies to reach out to a wider audience,” said Howard Wang, chief technology officer, Lazada Group.

Lazada Group also promises to continuously optimise LazzieChat’s algorithms to recognise inappropriate content so it can respond accordingly and responsibly to user queries with regard to the challenges of the growing development of natural language chatbots.

As conversations ramp up about the safety of artificial intelligence (AI) systems, OpenAI, has launched a programme to award ten individual US$100,000 grants to fund experiments in setting up a democratic process for deciding what rules AI systems should follow. This democratic process will be within the bounds defined by the law, OpenAI said in a statement. 

This comes as OpenAI notes that decisions about how AI behaves should be shaped by diverse perspectives reflecting the public interest. 

"​​Laws encode values and norms to regulate behavior. Beyond a legal framework, AI, much like society, needs more intricate and adaptive guidelines for its conduct," it said. 

It continued by saying that by “democratic process”, it is referring to a process by which a broadly representative group of people exchange opinions, engage in deliberative discussions and then decide on an outcome via a transparent decision-making process.

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