Amazon has launched a new AI chatbot called Rufus, which is designed to help online shoppers browse products and decide which ones to buy. Rufus is a generative AI assistant that can answer shopper questions about products listed on Amazon. The AI that underpins the chatbot was trained on the e-commerce marketplace’s product catalog, as well as shopper reviews and content from its Customer Questions & Answers section. Rufus is available to a “small subset” of the consumers who use Amazon’s mobile app. It activates when a user enters a query into the built-in search bar. The chatbot’s answers appear in a panel at the bottom of the app interface that can be toggled by the user. Rufus is designed to answer shopper questions about products listed on Amazon, and it can suggest questions by simply entering regular search terms, without having to come up with your own questions. Rufus will initially be available in beta to a limited number of Amazon app users living in the US, and Amazon plans to progressively roll it out to the rest of its US customers in the coming weeks.
