After several months of testing, Amazon is launching its generative AI-powered shopping assistant, Rufus, to all U.S. customers today.
The conversational assistant aims to help customers save time and make better purchase decisions, according to Amazon. Rufus is integrated within the Amazon shopping app just in time for Prime Day, which spans from July 16 to 17.
Originally announced in January, Rufus can answer specific questions about products, including their maintenance and materials. The AI assistant can also offer product recommendations, comparisons, and updates. Additionally, Rufus allows customers to track packages and review past orders. Beyond shopping assistance, Rufus can also provide advice on topics like preparing a soufflé or planning a summer party, Amazon noted.
Amazon, the largest cloud provider, has also introduced its own AI training and inferencing chips and a platform named Bedrock, which is intended for developers to create generative AI applications on its Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud service. Despite this, the company has not concentrated as heavily on developing AI products compared to competitors like Google and Microsoft.
It was recently reported that Amazon is developing an AI chatbot, internally dubbed “Metis,” to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. According to Business Insider, citing unidentified sources and an internal document, the chatbot will be accessible via a web browser and will be powered by an internal AI model named Olympus. This model is said to be more robust than Amazon’s public AI model, Titan.
In March, Amazon completed its largest investment in an external company by injecting $4 billion into AI startup Anthropic. Anthropic relies on AWS as its primary cloud provider and plans to use Amazon’s AI chips to develop, train, and deploy its future models.