Amazon Launches Rufus, an AI Assistant in Its Shopping App

amazon rufus AI shopping assistant
Image Courtesy: Amazon
In Short
  • Amazon has added an AI shopping assistant called Rufus to its mobile shopping app.
  • It can answer questions about products, recommend products based on your preferences, compare various items, and more.
  • Currently, Rufus is available in beta to only to a small subset of users in the US.

Amazon has added an AI assistant tool called Rufus to its shopping platform. The AI is trained on Amazon’s extensive catalog of products and information sourced from the internet. It works like any other AI chatbot, but it’s integrated right inside the Amazon app. You can ask it questions about products, and shopping needs, compare various items, discover new products, and much more.

Rufus Can Help You Find the Right Product on Amazon

Amazon is currently launching Rufus in beta to a small subset of customers in the US only. The e-commerce giant says Rufus will be available to more US customers over the coming weeks. Amazon has a huge public dataset from its shopping app to make a custom LLM that can cater to the personalized needs of customers.

Besides product catalogs, the company has also used customer reviews and community Q&As to build the Rufus AI chatbot for Amazon. You can ask Rufus general questions like, “What should I consider before buying a headphone”, “What do I need for hiking to a remote mountain”, or specific ones like “Show me dinosaur toys for a 5-year-old kid”. It also considers the context of a product you are viewing and answers accordingly.

To get started, update the Amazon app and start typing your question in the search bar directly. You can also tap on the star-like symbol at the bottom to launch Rufus in the Amazon shopping app. It’s worth mentioning that Amazon started AI-generated review highlights last year and it’s already live in most regions. Now, with the Rufus AI shopping assistant, Amazon is ready to fully integrate generative AI capabilities into its shopping app.

So what do you think about Amazon’s Rufus AI shopping assistant? Are you still going to use ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, or Bard for product recommendation and AI shopping assistance? Let us know in the comment section below.

VIA TechCrunch
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