#AI powered recommendation engines Fine Wine Delivery.
In an industry first, Fine Wine Delivery has embraced the latest in technology, partnering with IBM to create an intelligent, rich shopping experience. Customers can now explore their expansive range of wine, craft beer and spirits with ease.
Customers can now search for products using ‘natural language' – basically how you would ask us if you popped in to one of their stores and were chatting to their expert team or the family. Using IBM's Watson artificial intelligence, the Fine Wine Delivery. website now understands searches containing brand, product, varietal, country, region, awards, styles and flavours, along with your desired price range. Any combination of these can be used in a natural language search. For example Dark, spicy Barossa Shiraz under $25.
Fine Wine Delivery teamed up with Auckland-based AI specialist, Spacetime, implementing IBM Watson ‘Discovery' to create a natural language search by ingesting extensive product information, together with Watson ‘Virtual Assist' to provide customised advice online.
The first development is that Watson understands how people talk – that’s the “natural language” part – and the results reflect that accordingly. Users don’t need to have any particular technical knowledge about wine to get a good result out of it. “Watson has basically ingested everything about the wines, including the tasting notes, which is really important,” says Dr Peter Catt from Spacetime.
“We ingest everything, and then Watson does something quite smart called enrichment. It understands entities – I don’t mean that in a sentient sense, but it understands mathematically that, for example, Barossa is a geographical term. So the enrichment takes place, and then it indexes everything so we can do a quick natural search. I can type in that I’m after a big chocolatey Barossa Shiraz for $50, and I’ll get a result. No other search engine as far as I’m aware can do that,” says Catt. They’ve even managed to teach it Kiwi colloquialisms, and Watson has learned what a ‘cab sav’ is.
The second development is around complexity and categorisation. Each individual wine can fit into many different boxes, over and above whether it’s a Shiraz, a Pinot Noir, or a Chardonnay. A bottle might be sweeter, drier, fuller-bodied, or fruitier among just a few of wine’s infinite adjectives. The more of those a customer provides the system – in effect the more complicated the information they input into the AI system – the closer it will get to recommending the perfect drop for them in that moment.
“It understands complexity, which is good. Most search engines are absolutely dumb. They’re not particularly useful, and you’ll get a lot of erroneous results. And if you put in more, rather than getting a finer result, you’ll probably get less accurate results,” says Catt.
It wouldn’t have worked without an enormous base of knowledge to underpin it all. Fine Wine Delivery Company has – between their three main in-house experts – more than 50 years experience. They categorise every wine they drink on a matrix based on its key elements, giving thousands of different permutations that reflect the uniqueness of every bottle. That vast trove of knowledge has now been transferred into the Smart Search system.
As for what AI can bring to that, the goal is simple and relies on that expertise being able to be delivered. The three resident tasters – Poole, his daughter Tracey Hawes and son Richard Poole – have been turned into virtual assistants on the website. Customers can chat with them, and the responses will be based on what they would say if someone was talking to them face to face. “I’d like Jeff to be having 600 different conversations with 600 different people at the same time,” jokes Poole.
It’s arguably the next logical step beyond online shopping in that it takes quite static information about products, and introduces new flexibility to the customer experience around sorting through them. Fine Wine Delivery Company has embraced the internet’s role as a sales platform – now AI takes that further.
“I know there are people saying AI is just hype, but it’s absolutely not,” says Catt.
Jeff and Virginia Poole, founders of Fine Wine Delivery, with son Richard and daughter Tracey, who have handed their knowledge over to a computer
