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 now available in the Amazon shopping app just in time for Prime Day, which runs from July 16 to 17.
Announced in January, Rufus can respond to specific questions about products, such as whether an item is easy to maintain and what material it’s made of. The AI-powered assistant can also offer product recommendations and comparisons, as well as provide product updates. Additionally, customers can use Rufus to track packages and review past orders. Rufus is also designed to help with non-shopping questions, such as what is needed for a soufflé or a summer party, according to Amazon.
Amazon, the largest cloud provider, has developed its own AI training and inferencing chips and a platform called Bedrock for developers to build generative AI applications on its Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud service. Nevertheless, the tech giant has not focused as heavily on creating AI products compared to competitors like Google and Microsoft.
It was reported last month that Amazon is working on an AI chatbot, internally called “Metis,” aimed at competing with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. According to sources cited by Business Insider, the chatbot will be accessible through a web browser and will be powered by one of Amazon’s internal AI models, Olympus, which is reportedly more powerful than the publicly available AI model, Titan.
In March, Amazon finalized a $4 billion investment in AI startup Anthropic, marking its largest investment in an external company to date. Anthropic uses AWS as its primary cloud provider, and Amazon stated that the startup will use its AI chips “to build, train, and deploy its future models.”