Design Semantic Product Search as a Tool for a Chat Assistant

Asked at OpenAI · System Design for ML · Difficulty: Hard · Last asked Aug 17, 2026

A large online retailer wants its shoppers to find products by talking to a chat assistant. The assistant is a language model that can call tools; your job is to build the product search tool it calls. Shoppers describe what they want in their own words ("a quiet blender for a small kitchen", "the same running shoe in a size 11", "a gift for a ten-year-old who likes science"), and the assistant turns that into a call to your system, which must return a short list of relevant, in-stock products with accurate prices.

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