Discover what Amazon’s new AI-powered shopping assistant Rufus can do, from answering questions to conducting comparisons
Amazon has announced the introduction of Rufus, an AI-powered shopping assistant, as part of its ongoing efforts to integrate AI technology into its range of products and services. This comes after reports emerged that the company was planning to enhance its voice assistant, Alexa, with personalized AI technology and introduce a new subscription model called Alexa Plus.
What is Rufus?
According to Bloomberg, Amazon is adding an AI shopping companion to its retail store to help shoppers compare and find answers to queries that are more complex than keyword searches.
The shopping assistant launched Thursday to a “small percentage of customers” who use Amazon’s mobile app, the e-commerce giant said in a blog post. According to the company, users can ask the software what they need to start an indoor garden, or ask for Valentine’s Day recommendations, among other things.
For years, shoppers have manually typed keywords or product names into Amazon’s search bar when either looking for a specific product or looking for one based on its features. This functionality suddenly seemed obsolete with the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other generative AI-based tools that can surface products based on conversational text strings and are ready to respond with recommendations and comparisons.
Walmart Inc. last month expanded the rollout of an artificial intelligence-powered tool that allows customers to search for products based on use cases instead of naming products individually. The app is available from the Walmart app for iOS users.
(Courtesy of Bloomberg)
