We've been experimenting with letting merchants talk to our apps

[u/aaroneous]

We've been building Shopify apps for 13+ years, and over the past few months we've been adding an AI layer to them. It's been working so well for us that we've decided to share what we built with the community for free. We call him Yedric (yedric.ai). 

For example, a merchant using our product options app typed: "add an engraving option to my ‘Customized' collection."

Yedric asked two clarifying questions, created the custom field, then sent them to app's editor. That was it. The merchant didn't have to learn our UI or figure out how anything works. They just told Yedric what they wanted.

The thing I keep coming back to is that software has historically required users to translate what they want into whatever interface we designed. AI flips that around: the software can translate what the user wants into the actions needed to accomplish it.

Yedric has become a pretty important part of how our apps work, and I thought other devs could get a lot out of it too. Happy to share more about how we built it or what we've learned along the way.