After months of testing, Amazon is releasing its generative artificial intelligence-powered shopping assistant, Rufus, to all U.S. customers today.
The conversational shopping assistant “is designed to help customers save time and make more informed purchase decisions,” Amazon said. Rufus is available in the Amazon shopping app just in time for Prime Day, which runs from July 16 to 17.
Rufus, first announced by Amazon in January, can address specific questions about products, such as whether an item is easy to maintain and what material it is made of. The AI-powered assistant can also provide product recommendations and comparisons, as well as product updates. Customers can use Rufus to track packages, check past orders, and even get help with non-shopping related questions, like what they would need for a soufflé or a summer party, according to Amazon.
As the largest cloud provider, Amazon has launched its AI training and inferencing chips along with a platform called Bedrock for developers to build generative AI applications on its Amazon Web Services cloud service. However, the tech giant has not put as much focus on developing AI products as competitors like Google and Microsoft.
Last month, it was reported that Amazon is working on an AI chatbot, internally named “Metis,” to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT. This chatbot will be accessible through a web browser and powered by one of the company’s internal AI models, Olympus. Business Insider reported, citing unnamed sources and an internal document, that Olympus is purportedly more powerful than Amazon’s publicly available AI model, Titan.
In March, Amazon completed a $4 billion investment in AI startup Anthropic—its largest in an outside company to date. Anthropic uses AWS as its primary cloud provider, and Amazon said the startup would use its AI chips “to build, train, and deploy its future models.”