There’s another chatbot in town. Rufus, Amazon’s AI chatbot now live for all US customers, albeit in beta. It follows a testing phase started in February. Rufus is currently tied to the app, not Amazon’s web version.
So what does he 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 things like that.
I fiddled with it a bit this morning and it looks good, albeit a bit dull. I will say that I’ve cross-referenced some of the recommended products with the web version, and Rufus doesn’t automatically list advertised products, at least so far.
It brings up a seemingly random list of products that have been reviewed several times. That’s fine by me, although I’m not going to buy something based on a day-old chatbot word. You can also ask specific questions about the products, but the answers are taken directly from the descriptions. As any Amazon customer knows, some of these descriptions are accurate and others are not. The chatbot is linked to your personal account, so it can answer questions about upcoming deliveries and the like.
Amazon says the bot was trained along with its product catalog, customer reviews, community Q&A and public information found on the web. However, he did not disclose from which sites he removed this public information and for what purpose. It didn’t even confirm that these were retail-adjacent websites.
If you want to try it, update to the latest version of the app and look for the colored icon on the bottom right. Maybe if we all work hard enough to ask ridiculous questions, we can break it in time Amazon Prime Day.
