Today, Amazon announced the release of Rufus, an AI-powered shopping assistant that it trained using data from the internet and the company’s vast product library. According to the corporation, the new tool will go live in beta format today with a small group of U.S. consumers before going live with more people in the coming weeks. Rufus will be available for customers to interact with inside the Amazon mobile app to help with product searches, comparison shopping, and recommendation making.

The AI chatbot’s launch follows other AI-powered features that Amazon.com has added to improve the shopping experience for users. These features include tools that help users in finding clothes that fit, tools that enhance product reviews with summaries of highlights and user sentiment, and tools targeted at advertisers and sellers.

Rufus, on the other hand, is a generative AI experience that can respond to queries from customers regarding their shopping needs, regardless of when they are starting their journey, trying to narrow down their options, or when they have more specific questions. It has been trained on the product catalog, customer reviews, community Q&As, and information from around the web.

To provide this experience, the business tells TechCrunch that it created a new internal LLM specifically for shopping and trained it on both its own data and “publicly available data from across the web.” However, it was not stated if other publicly accessible retail websites were included in that statistics.

For example, Rufus might be questioned by a consumer looking to purchase running shoes about “What to consider when buying a running shoe,” according to Amazon. “What distinguishes road running shoes from trail running shoes?” or “Do these hold up well?”

Consumers looking into different products could also have questions like “What should I look for in headphones?” “Things to take into account when detailing my car at home” “What are products for clean beauty?” “What am I going to need for golf in the cold?” and more. Alternatively, you may just tell Rufus what you’d like to do, such as “I want to start an indoor garden.”

If you ask the AI questions like “What are good gifts for Valentine’s Day?” or “What are some recommendations for Valentine’s Day,” it can also assist with product comparisons. or “What are a five-year-old’s best dinosaur toys?” The customer can browse further filtered results after Rufus responds.

Put differently, you can speak with the AI assistant in a similar way as you would with other chatbots aimed for consumers, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Bard, which also has shopping abilities.

Rufus may be accessed by a new button in the bottom navigation bar of the Amazon mobile app, and it will be made available in beta form to a limited number of users in the United States. Consumers can ask inquiries by speaking or typing them into the chat dialog box that displays at the bottom of the screen for the AI.

After using the chat window, users may swipe down to go back to the Amazon app by rejecting it and bringing it back to the bottom of the screen.

According to Amazon, the beta will help it in enhancing both the product and its long-term generative AI projects.

The business stated in a blog post that “generative AI is still in its early stages and that the technology won’t always get it exactly right.” “In order to gradually make Rufus more beneficial over time, we will continue to enhance our AI models and adjust replies. Consumers are welcome to provide feedback by giving their responses a thumbs up or down, and they can also provide freeform comments,” the statement stated.

The business informs us that while the chatbot won’t have ads when it first launches, other features may be added later on if they improve the Rufus experience for users.

We are unable to comment on the bot’s efficiency because it was not made accessible for testing. However, it’s important to note that Q, Amazon’s AI chatbot designed for enterprises, has had issues, disclosing private information and causing hallucinations (false information).

Other American consumers will be able to use Rufus in the “coming weeks.”