Amazon's AI-powered shopping assistant called “Rufus” is now available to all US customers within the Amazon mobile app, the retailer said announced on Friday. The assistant, which is positioned in the underside right of the app's predominant navigation bar, is designed to assist customers seek for products, perform product comparisons and receive purchase recommendations.
Rufus was initially only available in beta for select US customers within the Amazon app before its launch on Friday. Now, in accordance with Amazon, all US shoppers can try it out after the chatbot was tested with “tens of hundreds of thousands of questions.”
The AI chatbot was first announced in February and was trained using Amazon's product catalog, customer reviews, community questions and answers, and other public information from around the online. However, Amazon doesn’t disclose what website data was used to present its assistant higher recommendations, or whether other retail web sites were included.
Rufus itself relies on an internal Large Language Model (LLM) that makes a speciality of shopping. Customers can ask questions on products, comparable to what aspects to think about when purchasing, the differences between items and other products, or the sturdiness of the product as described in customer reviews and other expert evaluation from the Internet.
For example, customers could ask questions like, “What should I search for when buying headphones?”, “What should I search for when doing automobile maintenance at home?”, “What clean beauty products are really useful?”, “What do I want to play golf in cold weather?” and more. Customers may chat with Rufus by telling the AI what they wish to do, for instance, “I would like to begin an indoor garden.” The chatbot will then make suggestions on what to purchase to perform that task.
In testing, Amazon found that customers asked the AI questions and in addition clicked on the related questions that appeared within the chat window to guide customer inquiries. For example, customers could ask Rufus, “What material is the backpack fabricated from?” after which tap one other query, “What are customers saying?” to learn more.
Because Rufus understands greater than just products, when a customer asked a couple of pool umbrella for Florida, he shared facts about Florida weather, humidity and more, Amazon says.
In addition to product comparisons, Rufus was also helpful in keeping customers up to this point on things like fashion trends or the newest technology, as customers could ask what the newest model of a product was or what styles were currently popular.
Rufus also served as an assistant to beta customers, helping them find their past orders or learn more about when current orders will arrive.
To access Rufus, US customers must use the newest version of the Amazon Shopping app. The assistant is out there in the underside navigation bar and is identified by an icon with sparkling chat bubbles.
In tests, TechCrunch found that Rufus was a superb shopping companion and largely avoided problematic answers to non-shopping questions. However, the reply wasn't all the time correct, and being limited to Amazon's extensive catalog could sometimes affect the standard of the recommendations.
Amazon says it would proceed to enhance Rufus over time.
