Amazon Brings Rufus AI Shopping Assistant to All US Customers

(Bloomberg) — Amazon.com Inc.’s artificially intelligent shopping assistant, Rufus, is now available to all US customers following five months of testing with a subset of consumers.

By tapping an icon in Amazon’s smartphone apps, shoppers can bring up a text chat interface and ask Rufus a range of questions, such as identifying durable outdoor speaker models, comparing running shoes or fetching order updates, the company said in a blog post on Friday. 

The assistant was trained on Amazon’s catalogue as well as the web so it will also spit out biographies of celebrities, suggest which lakes to visit in Maine, or write a short story — capabilities made familiar by ChatGPT and similar chabots. 

Rufus is Amazon’s highest-profile consumer product to take advantage of generative AI, which can create text, video and images based on simple user prompts. The company also uses AI to summarize product reviews, builds tools for developers and companies to deploy their own AI services, and is revamping its Alexa voice assistant. 

©2024 Bloomberg L.P.