Amazon has taken the wraps off of an AI shopping assistant, and it’s called Rufus — the same name as the company’s corgi mascot. The new chatbot is trained on Amazon’s product library and customer reviews, as well as information from the web, allowing it to answer questions about products, make comparisons, provide suggestions, and more.
Rufus is still in beta and will only appear for “select customers” before rolling out to more users in the coming weeks. If you have access to the beta, you can open up a chat with Rufus by launching Amazon’s mobile app and then typing or speaking questions into the search bar. A Rufus chat window will show up at the bottom of your screen, which you can expand to get an answer to your question, select...