KUALA LUMPUR: Bargain hunting in the digital era now involves negotiating with Nibble, a price-haggling chatbot.
Developed by a UK-based start-up of the same name, Nibble is an artificial intelligence (AI) that tests users' negotiating skills, staying firm against the tricks that have fooled other chatbots.
George McGowan, a software engineer from London, took it to X to share his recent experience utilising Nibble to secure an 8 per cent discount on a mattress from Eve Sleep, a mattress company.
In the post, McGowan shared the original price of the mattress was £940 (RM5,697), but he managed to bring the price down to £870.
Initially, he attempted to persuade the chatbot to reduce the price to £500, but Nibble held its ground and countered his offer.
"There are low offers, and then there's…That. I can't accept, sorry," the chatbot responded, according to the screenshot of the conversation shared by George on X, yesterday.
Some netizens who commented in his post also said they had a similar experience with Nibble.
"I'd assume they are smart enough to not let the AI actually dictate the price. Must be user set values in the backend large language models (LLMs) to make the chat experience more human-like. The lowest I was able to get was £862 with full on negotiation," said Akshat Giri.
"Fun, I got it to give me a final offer and then it quit," said Zach Alberico.
Meanwhile, some praised the idea of using chatbot for price negotiations.
"This idea is genius. Not necessarily good, but legitimately genius to have built something like this," said David Awad.
"Absolutely genius, to be honest. If you thought sales made people buy things because it made them feel like they got the timing right, imagine how much people will want to buy when they are feeling grandiose about persuading the AI to mark it down US$200 (from US$1,000)," said a user.