After extensive testing, Amazon is launching its AI-powered shopping assistant, Rufus, for all U.S. customers today.
The conversational shopping assistant is designed to help customers save time and make more informed purchase decisions. Rufus is now available in the Amazon shopping app just in time for Prime Day, which occurs on July 16 and 17.
Amazon introduced Rufus in January, highlighting its capabilities to answer specific product questions, such as maintenance ease and material composition. The AI assistant can also suggest products, provide comparisons, and offer updates. Additionally, customers can use Rufus to track packages and review past orders. Rufus can even assist with non-shopping queries, like preparing a soufflé or planning a summer party.
As an industry leader in cloud services, Amazon has developed its own AI training and inferencing chips and a platform called Bedrock for developers to create generative AI applications on its AWS cloud service. Despite these advancements, Amazon has not focused as much on developing consumer AI products compared to competitors like Google and Microsoft.
Reports last month indicated that Amazon is developing an AI chatbot, named “Metis,” to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. This chatbot will be accessible through a web browser and powered by Amazon’s internal AI model, Olympus, which is said to be more advanced than the publicly available model, Titan.
In March, Amazon finalized a $4 billion investment in AI startup Anthropic, marking its largest external investment to date. Anthropic uses AWS as its primary cloud provider, and Amazon stated that the startup would leverage its AI chips to develop, train, and deploy future models.