Hi HN! I previously launched Agora, a search engine for e-commerce products, here on HN: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38635695">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38635695</a><p>Sticking to the Ancient Greek theme we just released Athena, an AI assistant that helps users find products in a personalized way. Athena gathers context of what you're looking for, asks specific questions about the product category and budget, and then presents a few recommendations.<p>To power Athena we're using text embeddings of the name, description, and tag fields with SBERT. Additionally, we're using LangChain, GPT-3.5, GPUs on Digital Ocean's Paperspace, a Mongo database, and servers on AWS running self-hosted Typesense. Agora currently has a dataset of about 200 million products from stores on Shopify, WooCommerce, Squarespace, and Wix.<p>The vision for Athena is to use AI to help people find any product in the world. I'm continuing to build it for someone like myself: I want to shop from smaller stores around the world but unsure where to start. Still working out a lot of bugs and enhancements before letting Hermes (i.e our aptly named store crawler) index billions of e-commerce products. We'll also feed in more data like reviews, discussion threads, and automated user feedback to improve the recommendation experience.<p>I'd love any feedback!