Amazon's AI Chatbot Rufus Now Available to All U.S. Customers
Amazon has officially launched its AI-powered shopping assistant, "Rufus," for all U.S. customers using the Amazon mobile app, the company announced on Friday. This assistant, located on the bottom right of the app’s main navigation bar, is designed to help users find products, perform product comparisons, and get recommendations.
Initially, Rufus was available in beta to a select group of U.S. customers within the Amazon app. After extensive testing across "tens of millions of questions," Amazon has now made Rufus accessible to all U.S. shoppers.
First introduced in February, Rufus has been trained on Amazon's vast product catalog, customer reviews, community Q&As, and other publicly available information from the web. While Amazon has not specified the external websites used to train Rufus, the chatbot is optimized to provide informed product recommendations and comparisons.
Rufus leverages an internal large language model (LLM) specialized for shopping, enabling users to ask detailed questions about products. For example, customers can inquire about factors to consider when buying headphones, detailing a car at home, understanding clean beauty products, or gearing up for cold-weather golf. Additionally, users can ask Rufus for guidance on specific tasks, such as starting an indoor garden, and receive product suggestions to achieve their goals.
During beta testing, customers frequently asked Rufus questions and clicked on related questions in the chat window for more information. For instance, a customer might ask about the material of a backpack and then tap on a follow-up question to learn more about customer feedback.
Rufus goes beyond simple product queries. When asked about a pool umbrella for Florida, for example, Rufus provided information about Florida's weather and humidity. The chatbot also helps users stay updated on fashion trends and the latest technology, answer questions about the latest product models, and suggest popular styles.
In addition to aiding with product searches, Rufus can help customers find past orders and track current orders.
To use Rufus, U.S. customers need the latest version of the Amazon Shopping app. The assistant can be accessed through the bottom navigation bar, marked by an icon featuring chat bubbles with a sparkle.
In tests, Rufus proved to be a useful shopping companion, generally avoiding problematic responses to non-shopping-related questions. However, it occasionally provided inaccurate information and its recommendations were limited to Amazon’s catalog, which could affect the quality of its advice.
Amazon has committed to continuously improving Rufus over time to enhance its performance and reliability.
