After months of testing, Amazon is launching its generative AI-powered shopping assistant, Rufus, to all U.S. customers today.
The conversational 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 runs from July 16 to 17.
Initially announced in January, Rufus can answer specific questions about products, such as whether an item is easy to maintain or what material it is made of, Amazon said. The AI assistant can also provide product recommendations and comparisons, as well as product updates. Additionally, customers can track packages, review past orders, and get help with non-shopping queries, such as what ingredients are needed for a soufflé or how to plan a summer party.
Amazon, the largest cloud provider, has launched its own AI training and inferencing chips and a platform called Bedrock for developers to create generative AI applications on its Amazon Web Services cloud service. However, the company has not focused as heavily on developing AI products as its competitors Google and Microsoft have.
Last month, it was reported that Amazon is working on an AI chatbot named “Metis,” aimed at rivaling OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The chatbot will reportedly be accessible through a web browser and powered by one of Amazon’s internal AI models, Olympus, which is said to be more powerful than Amazon’s publicly available AI model, Titan.
In March, Amazon completed a $4 billion investment in AI startup Anthropic—its largest investment in an outside company to date. Anthropic uses AWS as its primary cloud provider, and Amazon stated the startup would use its AI chips to build, train, and deploy its future models.