BoozeBot.ai – Take a Photo, Find the Review for Any Bottle of Spirits

Over the years, I’ve spent quite a bit of time and effort improving the search catalog for this website. On the Reviews tab, you can interact with a system that I custom designed and coded from scratch, which helps you find exactly the review you want by slicing our catalog by manufacturer, by region, even by specific appellation in some cases. And today we’re adding a new feature that will let you search our catalog even easier: BoozeBot.ai

This is frankly something I’ve wanted to do for quite a long time, and the commoditization of AI has finally advanced to the point where I can’t justify putting this off any longer.

When it comes to whiskey, bourbon, tequila, etc., the quality and characteristics of the product are uniquely impossible to understand just by looking at the label. Computer components, for example, have the physical characteristics and technical specifications right on the box for you to compare. A closer class of product is something like wine — but even then, the color and the grape variety at least give you an idea of what you’re getting. For spirits, the variety of flavors that you can find even just within the category of “Straight Bourbon Whiskey” is maddeningly huge, and it’s near impossible to tell what you’re going to get just from the label and the color of the spirits.

It’s not like you can just have a sample of the bottle there in the store, either. You need to purchase the whole bottle before you know whether you like it — and by then it might be too late to get your money back.

That’s why big name brands focus heavily on marketing and advertising budgets for their spirits. Since “free samples” aren’t really something that you can reliably find at the liquor store, people have to rely on their eyes and previous advertisements they’ve seen when they are selecting a bottle from the shelf. People are much more likely to buy a bottle they pick up and feel, and one that looks expensive compared to the competition. So companies can directly influence through spending more on marketing instead of the actual product inside the bottle… meaning big budget companies can take a larger cut of the market share with terrible products, while legitimately delicious whiskey can be left on the shelf solely due to aesthetics.

My goal with this website has always been to try and help people find the best whiskey (or gin, or rum, or tequila) that they can possibly get for their dollar. That’s why our review scale is calibrated to price — “how good is this bottle compared to others in this price range” — but no matter how much effort I put into the search and browse feature of the site, it can still be difficult to find what you are really looking for, especially if you’re at the store and need to find something quickly. Or if you’re at a bar or a restaurant and don’t want to spend forever scrolling through reviews to find the right one.

So I built BoozeBot.ai

And yes, I actually built it myself. I’ve been writing and deploying web applications for nearly two decades, with a GitHub history that goes back to 2011. In this case, the logic, the infrastructure, and the prompts are all things that were built by me, and I’ve integrated with OpenAI using their API to take advantage of their AI models. You can read more about it on the site, including the privacy policy.

This bot is intended to allow you to take a photo of a bottle of booze, submit it to the bot, and it will attempt to automatically identify what brand and product that bottle is, and provide you a short review of that specific bottle of booze.

• For spirits that we have reviewed here at Thirty One Whiskey, the bot will automatically find our review, provide a picture from that review, and summarize that review for you. There will also be a link at the bottom of the summary to go read our full review.

• If we haven’t reviewed the bottle personally the bot will try to generate a summary of what other people have said about that specific bottle of spirits. This may not always be accurate, but we do include a note at the bottom of the review if this happens to let you know that you should take the summary with a grain of salt.

This is just the first release of this bot, and improvements will be made in the future. If y’all use this and find it useful please let us know, as well as any issues you run into, feature requests for new improvements, or any other recommendations you might have. We’d love to hear them in the comments!