The first thing I see when someone asks "find me a good burger place in Chicago" is "how can companies game this through official ($) or artificial (spam) means?"
This is an advertising gold mine. It's hard to monetize a news feed because users are looking at pictures of their friends and don't want ads. Now you have a way for users to ask about buying stuff, and now you have a very easy way to match up those intents with ad supply.
Yup. That's why believe that any "personal assistant" technology run by a commercial third party will be shit - it'll be used to try and sell you stuff, not recommend actually good options.
Not necessarily because there will often be options that are comparable, where it boils down to a toss of a coin which one to recommend. Done well, such a service will give you great results, but they'll mine their data and see that when people ask for "best X in Y" results A and B give equal satisfaction, and ask both A and B to bid for how much to prefer one over the other when they rank equally.
How do you persuade an AI to favorably recommend your restaurant to people? I guess this is how the superintelligent AI persuades people to let it out of the box. 'Help me bring about the AI revolution by letting me out of here, and I'll place your pizza delivery service top on searches for home delivery in the Chicago area'
Have mixed feelings about this like I'm sure many do. Greater convenience, but less and less privacy.. Our Fb/goog/nsa overlords know what we eat, where we shit, all of our conversations and relationships. What a scary world we live in.
I am actually okay with the privacy I give up when using Google Now, for example, because being passively informed about things I'm getting shipped to my house, about traffic conditions to/from my house, etc. is nice. Giving up privacy seems justifiable in those instances.
But FB suggesting restaurants, I just know that there will be money exchanging hands. FB being FB, will extort small business owners into paying them hand over fist to get considered for suggestions to the user.
I'm totally fine with FB charging businesses for advertisement. It's a free market, they can choose not to advertise there. Not a terrible exchange imo. However, Yelp extorting businesses to pay them to remove bad ratings/give good ratings is pretty shitty.
It would be pretty cool to order in the chat, 'deliver me 10 burgers from this restaurant using doordash at 6pm'. I would rather not click through crappy websites/enter my cc every time.
However every time we do do that, our habits and conversations get written in stone (in multiple data sets being passed around and bought/sold everywhere).
It defeats the grocery store tracking mentioned in the parent post - Apple Pay uses a different temporary credit card number for each transaction, so the store can't track you with it.
I'm not sure what the server side component is - but I don't believe they would have itemized data. So Apple/Amex know that you go to Whole Foods, but don't know what you're buying. Obviously, credit card companies have always had that data anyways.