Transforming the Food Delivery Experience with AI: A New Era for Uber Eats

18

October

2024

5/5 (1)

In today’s fast-paced world, more and more people rely on food delivery to solve their daily meals. However, the excessive number of restaurants and dishes on food delivery platforms often consumes a lot of time for users to choose. This sometimes even causes users to give up ordering. As a leader in the food delivery field, Uber Eats also faces this problem.

Our business plan is centered on UberChat, a GenAI assistant that can provide personalized recommendations based on users’ personal preferences, budget and expected delivery time. This can effectively improve the user experience. UberChat allows users to describe their needs by communicating with users in text through a conversational interface. This will replace swiping through endless restaurant options on the screen.

Why AI?

According to industry analysis, the food delivery market will see significant growth, from $151.5 billion in 2022 to $411 billion in 2027. The growth of the market size will in turn drive demand. Consumers will expect more convenient, personalized recommendations. According to research, personalized experiences can increase companies’ revenue by 10-15%.

Uber Eats will follow this trend by integrating UberChat. Users can replace manual searches with conversations. The ordering process will be easier. Whether you are looking for vegetarian food under 20 euros or pizza delivered in 30 minutes, AI will provide suggestions that meet these criteria.

The Power of AI in Customer Support

In addition to recommendations, UberChat is also able to answer many questions on behalf of customer service. This includes answering common questions such as order status. By reducing manual intervention, it will not only reduce operating costs by more than 20%, but also shorten response times by up to 50%. With such efficiency improvements, Uber Eats can handle more customer inquiries while keeping customers happy.

How We’re Making It Happen

We plan to implement this AI by acquiring and structuring all relevant data from Uber Eats, including menus, user reviews, delivery times, and real-time restaurant availability. This data will be used to train the AI, ensuring it provides accurate and helpful responses. APIs from Uber Eats will feed live updates into the AI, making sure recommendations reflect current restaurant offerings and delivery times.

The user interface for UberChat will be simple and integrated seamlessly into the Uber Eats app. Through A/B testing, we’ll identify the best placement and design to maximize user interaction.

The Future of UberChat

UberChat will continue to evolve as Gen AI evolves. In the future, we envision AI becoming even more advanced. It can predict user needs based on past behavior, provide personalized discounts, and increase revenue through price discrimination. By seamlessly integrating with other voice-based platforms such as Google Assistant or Siri, iterations of UberChat will not only enhance the user experience, but also keep Uber Eats at the forefront of innovation in the food delivery industry.

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Does Easy-To-Use Local Image Generation AI Applications Have Commercial Potential?

10

October

2024

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There are many AI applications for image generation, but many of them are based on the Internet and the cloud, and are charged by subscription or based on the number of times used. Unlike these, Stable Diffusion WebUI, as an open source and free image generation tool, has attracted widespread attention with its powerful capabilities. However, it also has a relatively high threshold for use. Based on my experience in using Stable Diffusion WebUI, I will briefly talk about the potential commercial prospects of low-threshold, easy-to-use local image generation AI applications.

Advantages of Stable Diffusion WebUI

The advantage of Stable Diffusion WebUI is not only that it is completely open source and free, but also that its model is deployed locally (that is, similar to the end-side AI mentioned at the iPhone16 conference). Since it runs directly on local hardware, it does not need to upload any data to the cloud. This means that users can fully call on the computing resources of their own devices without connecting to the network.
Compared with cloud applications such as MidJourney, the protection of data privacy is a major advantage of local applications. Neither the user’s input nor the generated images are uploaded to the server, but are processed locally, which is suitable for users who are sensitive to data security and privacy.
At the same time, because it runs on local hardware, its performance can be very high. It can flexibly call on the computing power of a high-end GPU, which is especially suitable for users with high performance hardware. It is not affected by network bandwidth and gives full play to its powerful image generation capabilities. All this makes it an extremely excellent tool.

The Threshold of Using Stable Diffusion WebUI

Although Stable Diffusion WebUI is powerful, its threshold of use also makes many ordinary users discouraged. This is my personal experience in installation, model import and debugging parameters.
First of all, the installation and operation process is relatively complicated. You need to download tools and deal with many environmental dependencies, such as Python and other necessary libraries. These steps are relatively complicated for many new users. Without the help of various forums, blogs and GPT, I would definitely not be able to do it.
In addition, the selection and import of models is also a big challenge. Although there are a large number of free model resources on the Internet, it is not easy to find a model that suits your needs. It will also take a lot of time to choose the SORA model. In the end, you need to adjust many parameters including the number of steps, sampling method, and resolution by yourself to achieve the desired effect. Its complexity also makes it difficult for users to control.

Civitai – A platform for sharing, discovering and downloading Stable Diffusion models and AI painting creation resources

Launch Simple Applications to Attract More Users

If we can launch a simpler and easier-to-use app based on Stable Diffusion WebUI, which is aimed at the consumer market and the general public, we will be able to push it to a wider market.
The key is to lower the threshold for use. By integrating environmental dependencies, such as pre-installing all necessary libraries and operating environments, users can skip the configuration process. The application can also provide a one-click model download and purchase channel to help users quickly obtain high-quality generated models.
At the same time, user-friendly interface design is also essential. While following various interactive design principles, optimize UI and UX, and simplify complex parameter adjustments into several key options. Let ordinary users easily generate the pictures they want without losing flexibility. For example, users can control the quality and style of the generated pictures through simple sliders or preset modes, avoiding complex technical details.

Commercial Potential

From a commercial perspective, local image generation applications based on Stable Diffusion WebUI have broad prospects.
The use of Stable Diffusion WebUI not only avoids the occupation of cloud resources, but also makes pricing more flexible. Compared with the payment model of conventional online image generation AI such as MidJourney, Stable Diffusion’s local application can adopt a variety of pricing strategies, such as buying out software, paying for advanced models, or allowing users to use the generation service unlimited times within a certain period of time through a subscription system.
Overall, through the simplified operation experience and flexible and low pricing, we may be able to build an “unpopular” image generation AI application based on the Stable Diffusion WebUI, attracting a wide audience and looking forward to its large-scale application.

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Will Vehicles Be the Most Powerful Terminal Device in the Digital Era?

20

September

2024

5/5 (1)

In the movie Captain America 2, the director of SHIELD drove a Chevrolet Suburban equipped with artificial intelligence, and successfully escaped the enemy’s blockade with the help of automatic maintenance, real-time analysis of road conditions and autonomous driving. We may never have a war vehicle equipped with machine guns and artillery like him, but the introduction of various new technologies has made the arrival of smart vehicle just around the corner.

Why Are Vehicles So Representative?

As a representative product of the digital era, the innovation of the automotive industry is closely related to many technological advances. First of all, the new form of energy – electric vehicles make it easier for computers to take over the energy management and driving of vehicles. The introduction of cloud computing and artificial intelligence has further enhanced the capabilities of vehicles. A large amount of data is transmitted between the vehicle and the cloud servers, and the on-board autonomous driving system analyzes road conditions in real time. In this regard, we have learned about Tesla’s FSD (full-self driving) which is pure vision solution, and there are also manufacturers such as Nio that are using lidar solutions. Even if AI is not completely taken over, the combination of AR applications and HUD (head-up display) functions can make human drivers’ own driving easier and safer.

Tesla FSD user interface.

What Is the Current Situation of the Automotive Industry?

Less than 20 years after the release of the first prototype, Tesla has surpassed Volkswagen, General Motors and Toyota to become the world’s most valuable automotive manufacturer. In contrast to Tesla’s success, the market share of some traditional brands with a long history continues to shrink. Industry giants such as Porsche and Mercedes-Benz have also begun to transform to electrification and intelligent driving. Behind the decline of old-era products and the prosperity of new-era products is the “digital disruption” that we are familiar with.

Mercedes-Benz Vision Avtr, steering wheel-free autonomous driving.

How to Imagine the Future?

If we regard all vehicles on the road as mobile large computers, the imagination space will be very broad. Reliable and powerful hardware (think of stable high-voltage power supply and complex heat dissipation technology) will enable vehicles to become the largest and most powerful terminal devices in the digital era. What else can we expect? AI models can be deployed locally instead of in the cloud; cockpits equipped with VR devices can serve as our entry into the world of metaverse.

Referances

Wu, A. (2024) The Story Behind Tesla’s Success (TSLA). https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/061915/story-behind-teslas-success.asp.

Staff, N. a T.A. (2024) Tesla Releases FSD v12.4: New Vision Attention Monitoring, Improved Strike System With Update 2024.9.5. https://www.notateslaapp.com/news/2031/tesla-releases-fsd-v12-4-new-vision-attention-monitoring-improved-strike-system-with-update-2024-9-5.

VISION AVTR | Future Vehicles (no date). https://www.mercedes-benz.ca/en/future-vehicles/vision-avtr#gallery.

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