Rufus, Amazon's AI-Powered Shopping Assistant (Image: Amazon)

E-commerce giant Amazon is all set to compete in the market with the generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology. Amazon has unveiled Rufus, an AI-powered shopping assistant, to improve the shopping experience of users. Currently, Rufus is only available in beta to select group of users in United States who use the Amazon mobile app.

Amazon claims that Rufus is trained on Amazon’s product catalog and information from across the web to answer customer questions on a variety of shopping needs and products. The AI-powered shopping assistant is also capable of providing comparisons, and make recommendations based on conversational context. Amazon also announced that Rufus will progressively roll out to additional customers in US in the coming weeks.

With Rufus, Amazon customers can learn what to look for while shopping product categories. Customers will also be able to search for and discover products based on activity, event, purpose, and other specific use cases by asking a range of questions. Moreover, shoppers can also use this AI tool to quickly get answers to specific questions about individual products when they are viewing the product’s detail page. Rufus will generate answers based on listing details, community Q&As, and customer reviews.

“With Rufus, customers are now able to shop alongside a generative AI-powered expert that knows Amazon’s selection inside and out,” said Amazon in a statement. To use this AI tool, customers can simply start typing or speaking their questions into the search bar in Amazon’s mobile app. A Rufus chat dialog box will appear at the bottom of the screen and customers can expand the chat dialog box to see answers to their questions and ask follow-up questions.

Amazon also said that they will improve their AI models and fine-tune responses to make Rufus more helpful over time. Amazon”s latest move comes at a time when AI is being integrated into numerous products and services.