Rufus, Amazon’s AI chatbot, is now available for all US customers

Rufus, Amazon’s AI-powered shopping assistant, is now available to all U.S. customers in the Amazon mobile app. Rufus can search for products, compare them, and make suggestions based on a lot of training from catalogues, reviews, and the web.

Amazon said on Friday that its AI-powered shopping assistant, Rufus, is now live in the Amazon mobile app for all U.S. customers.

The assistant, situated in the bottom right corner of the app’s main navigation bar, assists users in finding products, comparing products, and receiving recommendations for purchases.

Before Friday’s launch, Rufus was only available in beta to a small group of customers in the U.S. through the Amazon mobile app.

After tests with “tens of millions of questions,” Amazon now says that all U.S. shoppers can give it a try.

First introduced in February, Amazon trained the AI chatbot on its product catalog, customer reviews, community Q&As, and other public web content.

However, Amazon has not disclosed which websites’ data it used to enhance its assistant’s suggestions or whether it sourced from other retail websites.

Rufus has a large language model (LLM) to handle shopping questions. This lets customers ask questions about products, such as what they should think about before buying, how they differ from other products, or how long the product lasts, based on customer reviews and expert analysis gathered from across the web.

People could ask things like, “What should I think about when I buy headphones?” “What should I think about when I clean my car at home?” “What are some good cosmetics for you?” “What do I need to do to play golf in the cold?” and more.

Plus, people can talk to Rufus and tell the AI what they want to do, like, “I want to start an indoor garden.” After that, the chatbot will suggest products to complete the task.

Amazon discovered that users not only asked the AI questions but also clicked on related questions that appeared in the chat window to assist with their queries.

People might ask Rufus, “What is the rucksack made of?” Click on a different question that says, “What do customers say?” to learn more.

Meet Rufus, Amazon’s Versatile Assistant

Amazon says that when a customer asked Rufus about a pool umbrella for Florida, he told them about the weather, humidity, and other things that are unique to Florida.

Not only did Rufus help customers compare products, but he also kept them up to date on things like fashion trends and new technology. For example, they could ask what the newest model of a product was or what styles were popular.

Rufus’s other job was to help beta customers find their old orders or find out more about when their new orders would arrive.

Customers in the United States will need to have the most recent version of the Amazon Shopping app to use Rufus. You can find the assistant in the bottom navigation bar, where there is an icon with chat bubbles that sparkle.

In tests, we found that Rufus was a good shopping partner and didn’t give many bad answers to questions when they weren’t shopping.

But it didn’t always get the facts right, and the fact that it could only use Amazon’s huge catalog could sometimes make the quality of its suggestions worse.

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Ellis Stevenson

https://theaiwired.com/