Amazon announced Friday that its AI-powered shopping assistant, Rufus, is now available on the Amazon mobile app to all customers in the U.S. The assistant, which appears in the bottom right corner of the app's main navigation bar, is designed to help customers discover products, compare products and get advice on what to buy.
Rufus was initially available as a beta within the Amazon mobile app to select customers in the U.S. ahead of its launch on Friday. Amazon said the chatbot is now being tested with “tens of millions of questions” and is available for all U.S. shoppers to try.
First announced in February, the AI chatbot is trained on Amazon's product catalog, customer reviews, community Q&A, and other public information found on the web, though Amazon hasn't revealed specifically which website data was used to help the assistant make better recommendations, or whether that includes other retail websites.
Rufus itself is powered by an internal large language model (LLM) specially tailored for shopping, allowing customers to ask questions about products including factors to consider when purchasing, how an item differs from others, the durability of the product, and more, all of which are explained in customer reviews and other expert analysis collected from across the web.
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For example, customers can ask questions like, “What should I consider when buying headphones?”, “What should I consider when taking care of my car at home?”, “What are my clean beauty products?”, “What do I need for golfing in the cold weather?”, etc. Additionally, customers can chat with Rufus by telling the AI what they want to do, such as, “I want to start an indoor garden.” The chatbot will then suggest what to buy to accomplish that task.
During testing, Amazon found that customers were asking the AI questions and then clicking on related questions that appeared in the chat window to guide their inquiries. For example, a customer could ask Rufus, “What is the backpack made of?”, then tap on another question, “What are customers saying?” to find out more.
Image credit: Amazon
Amazon says Rufus understands more than just the product, so when a customer asked about pool umbrellas in Florida, Rufus gave them facts about Florida weather, humidity, and more.
In addition to comparing products, Rufus also helped keep customers up to date on fashion trends, the latest technology, and more, as customers could ask questions like what the latest models of a product were and what styles were popular.
Rufus also acted as an assistant for beta customers, helping them search past orders and get details on when their current orders would arrive.
Image credit: Amazon
To access Rufus, US customers must be using the latest version of the Amazon Shopping app. The assistant is available in the bottom navigation bar, denoted by a sparkly chat bubble icon.
In TechCrunch's testing, we found that Rufus worked as a decent shopping companion, and mostly avoided problematic answers to non-shopping questions, but it didn't always get the facts right, and being limited to only Amazon's catalog (which is huge) sometimes hurt the quality of its recommendations.
Amazon says it will continue to improve Rufus over time.