Amazon introduces generative AI shopping assistant Rufus, which is available for beta testing

Amazon He may be late to the party, but he has finally decided to enter Generative. Artificial intelligence (AI) race. The e-commerce company last week introduced an AI-powered shopping assistant called Rufus, which it claimed would improve the shopping experience for customers. A chatbot can answer questions, help with recommendations, and even compare different products. Currently, Rufus is only available in beta for a small subset of Amazon mobile app users in the US. It will be rolled out to a larger user base and more regions in the coming months.

Rufus was introduced in an announcement. Post Created by Amazon where it mentions that the AI ​​chatbot was “trained on information from Amazon’s extensive product catalog, customer reviews, community Q&A, and information from around the web.” Amazon told TechCrunch reports that the company has developed an internal large language model (LLM) that specializes in the shopping experience to build Rufus.

According to one Reports According to the New York Times, Amazon has a policy of allowing its employees to bring dogs into the workplace, and Rufus was one of the first dogs to roam the office in the early days.

Users can ask Rufus questions such as “What should I consider when buying headphones?” And get information in a conversational tone. There’s the option to ask follow-up questions, ask for recommendations, compare two different headphones, or ask for details about a particular product like durability or how good the sound quality is. The chatbot can take input in both text and audio formats, however, it can only generate text for now.

While Amazon didn’t specify, it looks like Rufus will only be available on the mobile app. Interestingly, there is no dedicated button to activate the Amazon AI chatbot. Instead, when users type questions into the app’s search bar, Rufus opens a dialog box at the bottom of the screen to answer the question. To dismiss it, users can tap elsewhere on the Amazon app.

Despite being a late entrant to the generative AI space, Amazon said it has been using AI to improve the customer experience for more than 25 years. The company said it uses AI and similar technology in its personalized recommendation system, in its fulfillment centers, drone delivery, Alexa conversational capabilities and in its checkout-free Amazon Go stores.

“We’re excited about the potential of creative AI and will continue to test new features to make it even easier to find and discover, research and buy products in Amazon’s store,” the tech giant added.

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