After months of testing, Amazon is launching its generative artificial intelligence-powered shopping assistant, Rufus, to all U.S. customers starting today.
The conversational shopping assistant is designed to help customers save time and make more informed purchase decisions, according to Amazon. Rufus is available in the Amazon shopping app just in time for Prime Day, which will take place on July 16 and 17.
Announced in January, Rufus can answer specific questions about products, such as their ease of maintenance and material composition, Amazon stated. The AI-powered assistant can also recommend and compare products, provide product updates, track packages, and review past orders. Furthermore, Rufus can assist with non-shopping-related queries, like what is needed for a soufflé or a summer party.
Amazon, the largest cloud provider, has introduced its own AI training and inferencing chips and a platform named Bedrock for developers to create generative AI applications on its Amazon Web Services cloud service. Despite this, the tech giant has not focused as much on developing AI products compared to its competitors, Google and Microsoft.
Reports last month indicated that Amazon is working on an AI chatbot, internally named Metis, to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. This chatbot will be accessible through a web browser and will be powered by one of Amazon’s internal AI models, Olympus, according to Business Insider. Olympus is said to be more powerful than Amazon’s publicly available AI model, Titan.
In March, Amazon completed a $4 billion investment in the AI startup Anthropic, marking its largest investment in an external company. Anthropic uses AWS as its primary cloud provider, and Amazon has announced that the startup will use its AI chips to build, train, and deploy its future models.