GRŌ: Your AI-Powered Gardening Assistant
Are you interested in starting a home garden but unsure where to begin? Do you feel like your home garden is bringing you more questions than plants? If you’re a novice gardener who just wants some help, then GRŌ, Grio’s AI-powered gardening assistant, is the app for you.
Exploring AI Integrations with Grio’s New App
When Grio set out to create GRŌ in 2023, our objectives were twofold. First, like the rest of the world, we had the AI bug, and we wanted to see exactly what we could accomplish with AI API integrations. While many of our developers had used them in other projects, we wanted to create an app that allowed us to fully test the capabilities and limitations firsthand.
Second, when looking at the app marketplace, we realized that other AI-powered gardening apps failed to utilize the AI chat feature to interact with users. We believed that we could use our skillset to create an app that more successfully helped novice gardeners gain the support they needed.
Utilizing AI Integrations to Improve the User Experience
For the GRŌ app, we chose to integrate with GPT-4. The GRŌ app has two distinct integrations with GPT-4: personalized recommendations and an AI chatbot assistant.
Personalized Gardening Recommendations
When users create their virtual gardens with GRŌ, they provide certain information, including their Zip Code. The AI virtual assistant uses this information to make personalized plant and care recommendations based on the unique needs of their biome (sun, soil type etc.) and their USDA Hardiness Zone.
To create these personalized recommendations, Grio had to create a specific prompt that allowed the AI to understand the user’s data and return information in a format that was concise and easy to read on a mobile device. The user can then select plants from the recommendations and add them to their personal (virtual) garden. Once a plant is in a user’s virtual garden, the app can continue to provide care recommendations throughout the year.
Your AI Gardening Assistant
Once a user’s virtual garden has been created, the user can then access their virtual gardening assistant. If the user has questions about their garden, they can ask them using GRŌ’s gardening assistant chat feature.
Creating the virtual assistant was more complex than simply providing users with access to ChatGPT’s normal chat feature. Our developers created parameters that controlled the format of ChatGPT’s responses and ensured that the assistant’s answers were relevant to the user’s location.
We also moderated what types of questions the gardening assistant could answer. If, for example, a user asks a non-gardening question, the gardening assistant replies: “I am an AI Horticulturist. I can only answer questions about plants and gardening.”
Other Components of Grio’s Gardening Assistant
The GRŌ app required more than AI integrations. The entire Grio team was involved throughout the development lifecycle to ensure the final product was a beautiful, streamlined app that resonated with users.
AI API Integration
The GRŌ app utilizes two distinct GPT-4 API integrations: data collection for personalized recommendations and the use of the chat feature.
Custom Design and UI
The GRŌ app was built from scratch, allowing Grio designers to create a custom design and user interface. Grio designers analyzed competitor apps to understand their strengths and weaknesses. They then used this market data to create a streamlined and sensible UI that users would love.
Data Analytics and Integration
The success of the GRŌ app is largely thanks to data analytics and integration. Though only a small quantity of user data is collected, it nonetheless allows Grio to create a highly personalized gardening experience for each user.
Branding
The GRŌ app’s branding is a homage to both the natural world and its parent organization. The blues and greens instill the peace and tranquility of gardening while aligning with Grio’s own color palette.
Download Your AI Gardening Assistant Today
Interested in beginning your own home garden or just seeing Grio’s AI expertise at work? Download the GRŌ app on iOS today! Or, contact us to see how we can help you use AI integrations in your next project.
