After months of testing, Amazon is launching 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 stated. Rufus is available in the Amazon shopping app just in time for Prime Day, which runs from July 16 to 17.
Announced by Amazon in January, Rufus can address specific product-related questions, such as whether an item is easy to maintain or what material it’s made of. The AI assistant also provides product recommendations, comparisons, and updates. Additionally, customers can use Rufus to track packages and check past orders. Rufus is also equipped to assist with non-shopping inquiries, including what ingredients are needed for a soufflé or planning a summer party, Amazon noted.
As the largest cloud provider, Amazon has introduced its own AI training and inferencing chips and a platform called Bedrock, which allows developers to create generative AI applications on its Amazon Web Services cloud service. However, Amazon has not focused as heavily on developing AI products compared to competitors like Google and Microsoft.
Recently, it was reported that Amazon is developing an AI chatbot, internally named “Metis,” intended to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. According to Business Insider, citing anonymous sources and an internal document, the chatbot will be accessible via a web browser and powered by one of Amazon’s internal AI models, Olympus, which is said to be more powerful than the company’s publicly available AI model, Titan.
In March, Amazon concluded its $4 billion investment in AI startup Anthropic, marking its largest investment in an external company to date. Anthropic, which uses AWS as its primary cloud provider, is expected to utilize Amazon’s AI chips “to build, train, and deploy its future models,” according to Amazon.