Amazon presents Rufus, its AI-powered chatbot that will help you make your purchases on the platform. A true personal shopping assistant, the chatbot will be integrated into the e-commerce application to help you make your choice.
On Amazon, you can order just about anything you want with just a few clicks and receive your purchases within days – if not hours, for Amazon Prime subscribers – of that. It’s quite simple, you are almost sure to find what you are looking for, in the different price ranges. However, you can sometimes be a little lost in the face of so many choices, finding yourself drowned in thousands of references. But don’t panic, artificial intelligence is coming to your rescue! Jeff Bezos’ company has also rushed into the AI race, integrating it into Alexa or using it to summarize comments and detect fake reviews on the platform (see our article ). This time, Amazon is counting on Rufus, an artificial intelligence designed to help you with your purchases. This chatbot is able to perform relevant searches, answer questions and make recommendations. To put it simply, it will more or less play the same role as a salesperson in a physical store. A bit like Hopla at Carrefour!
Amazon Rufus: an AI-powered shopping assistant
“Rufus significantly improves the ease with which customers can find and discover the best products to meet their needs”explains Amazon in its blog post. The company describes it as a shopping assistant that can answer your questions to help you find the product you need. For example, you can ask him “what to consider when buying running shoes?” or “what are the differences between trail and road running shoes?” and even him ask more specific questions such as “Are these sustainable models?” It can also support you if you want to start a project or a new activity, but you don’t know exactly what you need for this. For example, you can ask what you need to plan for playing golf in cold weather, or what tools you need to start creating a small indoor garden. When searching, a few suggested related questions will appear to make things easier and help you get started. It can even make comparisons between different items to help you make your choice.
To answer your questions, Rufus relies on a language model trained on Amazon’s product catalog and information from the web. You can ask about the characteristics of an individual product, to find out if a piece of clothing is machine washable for example. It will be based on the information provided by the seller, but also on the questions/answers section present on each page and on the reviews posted by users. And this is where things can get stuck, because the platform contains many false reviews intended to deceive the consumer… We can only hope that the chatbot manages to differentiate between them…
For now, Rufus is still in beta and is only available to a limited number of US users. Its widespread launch should take place gradually in the coming weeks, in waves, but again only in the United States. Unfortunately, the company does not yet mention availability in Europe.