Amazon has announced the launch of a new expert shopping assistant, trained to make recommendations and give consumers advice on shopping needs and products.
The assistant – Rufus, has initially been launched in beta to a small subset of customers in Amazon’s mobile app and will progressively roll out to additional U.S. customers in the coming weeks.
The feature builds on several new generative AI-based tools that the company has launched in the last twelve months including its AI-generated review highlights that compiles common themes from up to thousands of reviews at a glance. As well this, Amazon recently invested up to $4 billion in Anthropic, a startup that builds safe and steerable AI models.
Announcing Rufus in a blog post, the company said: “From broad research at the start of a shopping journey such as ‘what to consider when buying running shoes?’ to comparisons such as ‘what are the differences between trail and road running shoes?’ to more specific questions such as ‘are these durable?’, Rufus meaningfully improves how easy it is for customers to find and discover the best products to meet their needs.”
Rufus is being made available to select customers when they next update their Amazon Shopping app. To use Rufus, customers in the beta must type or speak their questions into the search bar in Amazon’s mobile app prompting a Rufus chat dialog box to appear at the bottom of their screen.
Customers can expand the chat dialog box to see answers to their questions, tap on suggested questions, and ask follow-up questions or they can dismiss Rufus to return to their traditional search results at any time.
“It’s still early days for generative AI, and the technology won’t always get it exactly right. We will keep improving our AI models and fine-tune responses to continuously make Rufus more helpful over time,” the company added.
