There’s another chatbot in town. Amazon’s AI chatbot Rufus is now live for all US customers, albeit in a beta version. This follows a testing phase that began back in February. Rufus looks to currently be tied to the app and not the web version of Amazon.
So what does it do? It’s an Amazon chatbot so it helps with shopping. You can ask for lists of recommended products and ask what specific products do and stuff like that.
I’ve tooled around with it a bit this morning and it seems fine, though a bit boring. I will say that I cross-referenced some of the recommended products with the web version and Rufus does not automatically list promoted items, at least for now.
It spit out a seemingly random list of well-reviewed products on several occasions. That’s fine by me, though I’m not about to buy something based on the word of a one-day old chatbot. You can also ask specific questions about products, but the answers seem to be pulled directly from the descriptions. As any regular Amazon customer knows, some of these descriptions are accurate and others aren’t. The chatbot is tied to your personal account, so it can answer questions about upcoming deliveries and the like.
Amazon says that the bot has been trained on its product catalog, along with customer reviews, community Q&As and public information found throughout the web. However, it hasn’t disclosed what websites it pulled that public information from and to what end. It didn’t even confirm that these were retail-adjacent websites.
If you want to try it out, update to the latest version of the app and look for the colorful icon on the bottom-right. Maybe, if we all work hard enough at asking ridiculous questions, we can break it just in time for Amazon Prime Day.
