Amazon launches AI shopping assistant to find and discover the best products

Just like every major tech company in the industry, Amazon is also getting its hands dirty developing generative AI features for its products and services. The company’s latest AI effort comes in the form of a new generative AI assistant called Rufus, designed to discover and find products that suit you the best.

Rufus is integrated into the Amazon shopping experience, so when you’re shopping on the platform and confused about which one to pick among multiple choices, you can ask the assistant to compare different products, and then make a purchasing decision.

Although available in beta, Rufus can do so much more than comparing different products. For example, it can answer questions such as whether a particular product is durable and what to consider when buying a particular product category. It can also recommend products based on the context of the conversations.

How exactly can Rufus answer these types of questions? Well, As explained by Amazon in its official blog post, the AI shopping assistant was trained on the company’s “extensive product catalog,” “customer reviews,” “community Q&As,” and “information from across the web.”

However, Rufus is currently limited to people in the U.S. What’s even worse is that only a small subset of customers in the U.S. will be able to use the shopping assistant in beta in the Amazon mobile app. That said, you’ll need to update the Amazon Shopping app on your phone to check if you’re one of the lucky ones. If you’re based in the U.S. and haven’t seen it yet, the e-commerce giant promises to “progressively” roll out the AI-powered shopping assistant to the rest of the U.S. customers in the coming weeks.

Rufus isn’t Amazon’s first “AI product”. The company made several AI announcements in the past few months, including new Echo products with generative capabilities, and AI-generated product listings in the Amazon Shopping app. Hopefully, we’ll see more AI features from Amazon in the coming months.