Amazon has unveiled Rufus, a new shopping assistant that uses generative artificial intelligence (AI) to help customers search for products. Rufus launched on Feb. 1 in beta version to a small group of US customers using Amazon’s mobile app. The tool will progressively roll out to the rest of its US customers in the coming weeks, the company said in a statement.
Rufus is currently being made available to select customers when they update their Amazon Shopping app. To use Rufus, they simply start typing or speaking their questions into the search bar in the app and a Rufus chat dialog box will appear at the bottom of their screen. Customers can dismiss Rufus to return to their traditional search results at any time.
Rufus is trained on Amazon’s product catalog and information to answer customer questions on products, help with comparisons and make recommendations. The personalized recommendations that customers get when they shop on Amazon, the pick paths in the company’s fulfillment centers and Alexa’s conversational capabilities are just a few examples of experiences fueled by AI.
With Rufus, customers can conduct more general product research on Amazon, asking questions like “What are clean beauty products?” and learn what to look for while shopping product categories. Products can be searched for by activity, event, purpose and other use cases, and Rufus suggests shoppable product categories and questions that customers can click on to narrow their searches. Among the other features, Rufus also provides quick answers to questions about individual products when shoppers are looking through their detail page.
