This project demonstrates an agentic use case for interacting with the online grocery store Picnic. Picnic is a Dutch online supermarket that delivers groceries to your door. I am a big fan of their service and simply wanted to create a fun project that combines their API with AI, without using any big agent framework such as LangGraph or Swarm. As an ML model, I have chosen the latest version of Googles Gemini model series called Gemini 2.0 Flash which is currently in experimental state. However, it is multimodal and accepts/generates not only written text but also voice out of the box.
This project requires a Google Gemini API key and a Picnic account.
- Create a .env file in the root directory and add the necessary environment variables. You can use the .env.example file as a template.
- Create a virtual environment using
uv venvand activate it usingsource .venv/bin/activate. - Run
uv run python picnic_agent.pyto start the agent.
In order to run the agent, simply execute uv run python picnic_agent.py. The agent will start and wait for your commands.
At this moment in time, it is necessary to use a headset, while talking to the agent, as it uses the microphone to
listen to your commands. Otherwise, the agent would talk to himself. picnic_agent.py is running the Gemini API in "TEXT" mode.
That means that the model response modality is text and not voice. In a second step, I am converting the text response to speech using the
Text-to-Speech API from Google. This gives me a lot more flexibility in terms of
language and voice selection. The downside of this approach is that I loose the speech interruption feature.
I always have to wait until the AI has finished speaking. I also tested the AUDIO response mode. However, that mode still seams to
be a bit buggy. It by fare does not perform as well as the Text mode, which might be, because of the experimental state of the model.
The AI agent has access to the following tools:
- search_for_products: Search for products in the Picnic store.
- add_product_to_cart: Add a product to your shopping cart.
- remove_product_from_cart: Remove a product from your shopping cart.
- search_for_recipes: Search for recipes on Picnic.
- add_recipe_to_cart: Add a full recipe to your shopping cart.
- search_for_cheaper_product_alternative: Search for a cheaper product alternative.
- replace_existing_product: Replace an existing product in your shopping cart with an alternative one.
- get_all_current_products_in_cart: Get all products currently present in your shopping cart.
This project was a fun, private project of mine and is not associated in any way with Picnic or any other company/person. Idea and implementation are my own and are not intended to be used in any commercial context. The API could have been a completely different one. I have chosen the Picnic API, simply because I am a big fan of their service.