E-commerce giant Amazon unveils Rufus, a chatbot using artificial intelligence to become your personal shopping assistant. It will help you find a specific product and answer your questions about this or that item, but not only that.
You don’t need a product as visible as ChatGPT or Bard to use the power ofartificial intelligence. Amazon has been using it for “more than 25 years”, the company tells us. In the conversational capabilities of Alexa, deliveries by drones or even stores without any staff. More recently, AI can even summarize product reviews to quickly get an overview. The latest novelty, however, will be much more concrete. Her name is Rufus.
“Rufus is an AI-powered expert shopping assistant trained on Amazon’s extensive product catalog, customer reviews, community Q&As, and insights from around the web to answer customer questions about a variety of needs and products, provide comparisons and make recommendations based on conversational context,” it reads. It seems a little vague put like that, we’ll explain.
Amazon’s Rufus AI can help you find the perfect product or compare items
In writing in chat form, or by voice, you can for example ask Rufus to to research with questions like “what should you look out for when buying headphones?”. Use a context also works: “what do I need for a mountain hike?” or “I would like to start an indoor garden”. The AI will then list suitable product categories. THE comparisons are also possible, such as “what are the differences between Italian coffee makers and electric ones”.
If looking for something for a special occasionOr for a person with a specific profile, ask questions like “what gifts for Valentine’s Day?” or “the best toys for a 5 year old who loves dinosaurs”. Finally, you can get details about a specific product, for example by writing “is this shirt machine washable?”. We see it clearly, it ultimately comes down toget answers by engaging in conversation naturally.
Amazon’s Rufus AI assistant is currently rolling out in beta version for some American users of theAmazon app. It will then be made available to more and more people, but only in the United States. It is not yet known whether the firm plans to eventually launch it in other countries around the world.