works · professional work
AI Shopping Assistant for Kiosks
An AI assistant on touchscreen kiosks that answers shoppers about products, promotions, tenants and events in stores and malls.
- period
- 2025 – 2026
- role
- Lead engineer since joining the project
- stack
- PHP · Laravel · JavaScript · OpenAI API · DeepSeek API · RAG
the problem
Some questions do not fit a map or a catalogue. Shoppers and staff ask them in their own words, at a kiosk, and expect a correct answer straight away.
the approach
- Answers stream to the screen as they are generated, with the system prompt and behaviour set per store.
- Product search is combined with current promotion pricing, so answers quote promotional prices where they apply.
- Scheduled scrapers keep mall promotions and events current, and one content area is answered through retrieval over indexed documents.
- Prompts are tuned for consistent answers and for refusing attempts at prompt abuse, backed by a spam guard.
- The assistant is also embedded in the Interactive Mall Directory as a chat panel.
the outcome
- Used by shoppers and staff, with a separate configuration for each store.
- Took over an existing codebase and became its main engineer.
Professional work. Client details and screens are withheld; happy to walk through it in conversation.