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 available in the Amazon shopping app just in time for Prime Day, which runs from July 16 to 17.
Announced in January, Rufus can answer specific questions about products, such as whether a product is easy to maintain and what material it’s made of. The AI-powered assistant can also provide product recommendations and comparisons, as well as product updates. Additionally, customers can track packages with Rufus and check past orders. Rufus can even assist with non-shopping related questions, like what ingredients are needed for a soufflé or a summer party.
Amazon, which is the largest cloud provider, has introduced 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. Despite this, the tech giant hasn’t focused as heavily on developing AI products as some competitors, such as Google and Microsoft.
Last month, it was reported 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 utilize one of the company’s internal AI models, Olympus, according to a report by Business Insider based on sources familiar with the matter and an internal document. Olympus is said to be more powerful than Amazon’s publicly available AI model, Titan.
In March, Amazon completed its $4 billion investment in AI startup Anthropic, marking its largest investment in an external company. 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.”