Amazon has rolled out its generative artificial intelligence-powered shopping assistant, named Rufus, to all U.S. customers after months of testing.
Amazon stated that the new conversational shopping assistant is designed to help customers save time and make more informed purchasing decisions. Rufus is now available in the Amazon shopping app, just in time for Prime Day on July 16 and 17.
Initially announced in January, Rufus can answer specific questions about products, such as their ease of maintenance and materials used. The AI assistant can also provide product recommendations, comparisons, and updates, track packages, and check past orders. Additionally, Rufus can assist with non-shopping-related inquiries, such as advice on cooking a soufflé or planning a summer party.
While Amazon is primarily known as the largest cloud provider, the company has developed its own AI training and inferencing chips. It has also launched a platform called Bedrock for developers to build generative AI applications on its Amazon Web Services cloud service. Despite these ventures, Amazon has not focused as heavily on AI product development as its competitors Google and Microsoft.
Recently, reports indicated that Amazon is developing an AI chatbot named Metis to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. According to Business Insider, this chatbot will be accessible via a web browser and will use 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 completed its $4 billion investment in AI startup Anthropic, marking its largest investment in an outside company to date. Anthropic, which uses AWS as its primary cloud provider, plans to utilize Amazon’s AI chips to build, train, and deploy its future models.