Society Watch

…watching over you!

check out new softwares that could tell you the actual worth of your goods

2 min read

The smart home hub can help you appraise certain items, through a partnership with eBay. The two companies on Wednesday demoed a new eBay shopping assistant called Shopbot. They showed off the service during Google’s Next Conference, which focuses on cloud computing, in San Francisco.

In the demo, RJ Pitman, eBay’s chief product officer, asked a Google Home on stage if he could talk to eBay, and the device sprung to life.

“Hi, I’m eBay. I’m the world’s price guide. You can ask me what something is worth,” the eBay chatbot said from the device’s speaker.

Pitman asked how much his camera was worth. The device then asked for more specifics, including brand, model and if the camera was new or used. The chatbot then told him the price value of the camera.

“In the spirit of going to where our customers are, we’ve taken it to Google Home because we want to get inside the home,” Pitman said.

The Shopbot is supposed to be like a digital “concierge” for shopping, he said. The goal is for it to understand natural language and get to know your shopping habits.

Ebay also said that Wednesday that it has brought some of its business operations to Google’s cloud services.

Cloud computing has become a very important business for Google as it looks for ways to make money outside advertising for its iconic search engine. Google’s cloud service competes against rivals Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, which provide storage and networking services for other companies.