Pinterest has announced the launch of a new AI-powered assistant that enables users to chat, collaborate, discover, and shop in one platform.

Pinterest Assistant, built primarily on an AI visual language model rather than a text model, is a "visual-first" tool which provides tailored search results.

The company says that the technology expands multimodal search, allowing context to seamlessly flow between images, voice and text.

Consumers use a mic to tell the platform what they are looking for, with the technology audibly responding with visual results personalised to them.

The technology uses the content from across its nearly 600 million monthly active users to provide the results, with questions prompting the tool to draw from the user's saves, boards, collages, and others with similar tastes.

The company said that because its systems learn from billions of signals and its proprietary Taste-graph, its latest multimodal AI model for visual search "outperforms off-the-shelf models by over 30 per cent" on the relevancy of shopping recommendations.

“People, especially Gen Z, say that the magic of Pinterest is that it ‘just gets me’, whether that’s finding the perfect outfit or knowing your distinct style,” said Bill Ready, Pinterest chief executive. “With Pinterest Assistant, we’re supercharging that magic by leveraging AI to help our users discover and shop like they would with that person who knows them best.”

The move comes after the business announced plans in August to open a new AI and machine learning engineering hub in Zurich, Switzerland.

The new centre focuses on developing AI-based solutions that personalise the user journey, drawing on Pinterest's visual search technology for relevant content recommendations , AI-based tools for ads relevance, and AI-based taste graph.

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