There’s another chatbot in town. Amazon AI Chatbot Rufus is now active for all US customers, although in beta version. This follows a testing phase which started in February. Currently, Rufus appears to be tied to the app and not the Amazon web version.
So what does this do? It’s an Amazon chatbot, so it helps with shopping. You can request lists of recommended products and ask what specific products do and things like that.
I played around with it a bit this morning and it looks good, if a little 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.
He has released a seemingly random list of highly rated products on several occasions. That’s fine with me, although I don’t intend to buy something based on the word of a day-old chatbot. You can also ask specific questions about the products, but the answers seem to come directly from the descriptions. As any regular Amazon customer knows, some of these descriptions are accurate and some are not. The chatbot is linked to your personal account, so you can answer questions about upcoming deliveries and the like.
Amazon says the bot was trained on its product catalog, along with customer reviews, community Q&As, and public information found across the web. However, it did not reveal which sites it took this public information from and for what purpose. It did not even confirm that these were retail-adjacent sites.
If you want to try it out, update to the latest version of the app and look for the colorful icon in the bottom right corner. Maybe if we all work hard enough to ask ridiculous questions, we can crack it just in time to Amazon Prime Day.
