Amazon has introduced 'Rufus,' an AI shopping assistant embedded within its mobile app, aiming to enhance the customer shopping experience. This AI tool, trained on Amazon's extensive product catalog and web data, will initially launch in beta for a subset of U.S. customers before expanding to a broader user base in the upcoming weeks. Rufus enables users to engage in conversations within the Amazon app, seeking assistance in finding products, conducting product comparisons, and receiving personalized purchase recommendations.

The debut of Rufus follows a series of AI-powered enhancements on Amazon.com, focusing on improving various aspects of the shopping journey. These additions range from tools assisting customers in finding well-fitting clothes to features enhancing product reviews with summaries and sentiment analysis. Rufus, described as a generative AI experience, draws knowledge from the product catalog, customer reviews, community Q&As, and web data, enabling it to answer a wide array of customer queries related to their shopping needs. Amazon developed an internal LLM (Large Language Model) specialized for shopping to power Rufus, training it on a combination of its proprietary data and publicly available information from the web. The company did not specify whether this included data from other publicly available retail websites. Examples provided illustrate how customers can inquire about considerations when buying specific products or seek advice on diverse topics, from starting an indoor garden to selecting gifts for special occasions.

While Rufus can assist with product comparisons and recommendations, it won't initially feature advertising. The beta launch encourages customer feedback through a rating system, allowing users to provide insights and help Amazon improve Rufus and its generative AI initiatives. The company acknowledges the early stage of generative AI, emphasizing continuous improvements and fine-tuning of responses to make Rufus increasingly helpful over time. Despite not being available for testing at the time of the announcement, Amazon plans to roll out Rufus to more U.S. customers in the coming weeks. The company acknowledges the evolving nature of the technology and commits to refining Rufus based on user feedback, striving to deliver a valuable and efficient AI shopping assistant to its customers.