Amazon's AI Shopping Revolution: Enhancing Prime Day Experience

3 Quick Ways AI Can Help You Shop on Amazon

Choosing the right product at Amazon can be challenging, especially if you don't know much about the item you want. One way that Amazon aims to help you is through the use of AI. Using the Amazon mobile app, people in the US can now chat with a bot known as Rufus. Tapping into its AI skills, Rufus aims to answer product questions by drawing on information from listings, customer reviews, and community Q&As. You can get recommendations for specific items, compare similar products, get updates on your orders, and even get advice on product-related activities and interests. From the web and the mobile app, you can also access an AI-generated summary of customer reviews. Or choose a specific product attribute (like "ease of use" or "reliability") to see excerpts of reviews referencing that factor. While you can't speak with Amazon's AI chatbot in a back-and-forth conversation, you can ask specific questions while shopping. Rather than scour through long product descriptions and hundreds of customer reviews, cut to the chase and find the relevant information quickly. You can also ask specific questions about a product. Just type or speak your query, and the AI will deliver the answers you need. It can even assist you when shopping for clothes by recommending the right size based on product details, reviews, and your own preferences. Before you proceed, be aware that today's generative AI tools are far from perfect. You may find inaccurate or misleading information in the AI summaries. If you're considering a particular product, you should still read some of the prominent reviews to gain a better sense of its quality, value, and features. Now, let's see how this all works. Talk to Rufus To take Rufus for a spin, make sure you've installed or updated the Amazon Shopping app for iOS/iPadOS or Android. Open the app and tap the chat icon with the red bubble to the right of the bottom toolbar. You can now ask Rufus a question by typing it in the chat field or tapping the microphone icon and speaking your query. You may want to start by asking Rufus for the best products in the category you want; for example, outdoor motion control cameras. Next, you could retrieve a listing for a specific product. Tap the icon for Rufus, and you can submit any of the sample questions or devise one of your own. Wait to see the response that Rufus generates. You may want to check the status of past or current orders. In the chat field, type or speak a request like: "Show me the status of my recent orders." Next, you could ask for advice with recipes, parties, home improvement, or other tasks related to different products. The summary will contain a brief AI overview condensing the opinions of the customers who rated or reviewed the item. Depending on the ratings and the product itself, the overview should reveal both the positive and negative aspects in a nutshell. Under the summary, you may find key aspects or brief comments about the product, such as "Great quality," "Easy to use," or "Worth the money." Each aspect will display an icon with a different color: A green circle with a checkmark is positive, a gray circle is neutral, and an orange circle is negative. You can drill down through each specific attribute to find excerpts of reviews that mention it. The screen also shows you how many reviews rated that feature as positive and how many as negative. Shopping for clothes? Amazon's AI can help you choose the right size and style. Open the page for a piece of clothing you want. Under the menu for size, there may be a suggested size that says something like "Medium is your recommended size based on millions of customer orders." This process will work better if you've already purchased clothing from Amazon. You should still consult the size chart for the item if one is available, but the recommended size can give you a good starting point. Ask Questions About a Product Want to ask specific questions about a product? Find a product that interests you and look for the Looking for specific info? section. Make sure the search field below it says "Search in reviews, Q&A..." You can then type or speak your question in the search field. In response, Amazon's AI scours the product information, customer Q&As, and reviews to find the answer to your question. You can then review the answers across all the categories or tap a specific category to check out only those responses. You can also select questions that other customers have asked. Move down to the Customers also asked section. Choose a suggested question; Amazon's AI then displays any answers addressing the question you selected.

4 ways to use AI to shop on Amazon Prime Day

Amazon Prime Day is just around the corner, but looking for the best deals or features on discounted products can seem overwhelming. Artificial intelligence (AI) tools already significantly enhance the Prime Day shopping experience with smart features and capabilities, from Autofill to personalized recommendations. But newer AI tools can make deal shopping even easier. Also: The 25 best early Amazon Prime Day 2024 deals The Prime Day annual sales event is on Tuesday, July 16, and Wednesday, July 17. Amazon has recently rolled out new AI tools that you can use just in time for Prime Day. Whether buying a tablet, robot vacuum, TV, or clothing, shopping on Amazon can give you an overwhelming list of search results when looking for the right deal. The good news is parsing these results is easy with current AI tools, like Amazon's AI shopping assistant, Rufus, and AI-generated review sentiments. Also: The 19 best early Prime Day 2024 Amazon Echo device deals Amazon just announced that its generative AI-powered shopping assistant, Rufus, is now available for all US customers, just in time for Prime Day. Rufus performs much like ChatGPT and other AI chatbots but is trained on Amazon's wide catalog and is here to enhance the shopping experience for Amazon customers. Instead of combing through Amazon search results to find what you need, you can engage Rufus in text conversations and ask for specific recommendations, product comparisons, and expert advice. Rufus narrows down your searches by understanding the context of your request, giving you results specific to what you're looking for, even with terms that aren't available in the filter menu. Aside from searching for "photo printer paper", you can ask Rufus specific questions like, "Which printer paper is suitable for photos?" or "Which printer paper options offer high brightness?" Also: Prime Day invitation-only deals are back on Amazon. Here's how to sign up Rufus is available to all Amazon customers in the Amazon Shopping mobile app, as it's unavailable to desktop users. I'm a big Google Lens fan, and I use it for everything from searching for plants and bugs to looking up the names of my kids' Squishmallows. However, not everyone knows Amazon has a similar visual recognition feature built into its mobile app, Amazon Lens. Amazon shoppers can search for products on the mobile app using their phone's camera or photo upload. The search bar at the top of the Amazon mobile app has the Amazon Lens icon next to the microphone icon. If you press this button, you'll enter the Amazon Lens feature, where you can scan products and barcodes or upload photos of products to search. Also: The 50+ best early Prime Day 2024 gaming deals I've used this feature to look for toys my kids have seen at their cousin's house, to scan products in the Amazon yearly holiday toy catalog, and to search for grocery items to add to my cart. When you upload a photo, you can circle anything you want to search in Amazon, like Android's Circle to Search feature. The app will look for products similar to what you selected and give you a list of search results. Amazon recently introduced AI-powered sentiment analysis in its product reviews, an AI-generated paragraph summarizing the product's buyer reviews. While one paragraph is often insufficient to convey what thousands of reviewers say, these summaries offer the gist of what buyers think about a purchase. For example, the reviews of the new Echo Spot, a smart alarm clock launched as an Amazon Prime Day promotion, are topped by a 'Customers say' section with this AI-generated summary, which reads: "Customers like the voice commands, ease of setup, appearance and weather information of the digital device. For example, they mention it does a better job at picking up voices in the room over any noise, has a nice equalizer for range of sound and that it's easy to read the screen. They also like the sound quality, and content settings. That said, opinions are mixed on quality and temperature sensor." This paragraph is followed by text that says, "AI-generated from the text of customer reviews." Also: The 10 best Prime Day 2024 fitness tracker deals These AI-generated sentiment analyses give you an 'in-a-nutshell' overview of the customers' experience with the device, highlighting both the positive and negative aspects. The summary helps you understand, in broad terms, what you can expect from what buyers think, which you can corroborate by reading the full reviews. Amazon has had a question-and-answer area in their product listings for years, where customers can ask product-specific questions, and the seller and other customers can respond. However, these questions, though helpful, are highly inefficient and prone to user error. Recently, Amazon updated this feature to generate answers with AI, with information taken from the product description, the questions and answers, and the customer reviews. Also: The 28 best early Amazon Prime Day Apple deals If, for example, you're looking for a smart light compatible with Amazon Alexa, you can go to the question field in the product listing and ask if it's also compatible with Google Assistant. Amazon generates an answer for you in natural language, with wording like "Customers say it's compatible with Google Assistant, and they've had good experiences with this feature."

I Tried Amazon's New AI Shopping Tool With Prime Day in Mind

Just a few days before this year's Prime Day sale, which is taking place July 16 and 17, Amazon rolled out a new app-only chat feature to all US customers to assist with their shopping. Called Rufus, the AI assistant has been trained on Amazon's products, reviews and Q&As, along with information from the web. Its goal is to answer questions about your shopping needs and Amazon's products, as well as to make product comparisons -- and, of course, to encourage you to spend. But Rufus also warns: "My answers are powered by AI, so I may not always get things right." It's refreshing to get that kind of caveat right up front. Generative AI software has been plagued by wrong answers and hallucinations. Google's AI Overviews mishaps in search results a few weeks back weren't an isolated problem. In the last 18 months, we've seen the arrival of multiple generative AI assistants, including OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude and Adobe's Firefly. Mistakes notwithstanding, they're capable of extraordinary tasks, from writing A-plus essays to creating never-before-seen images. But e-commerce is one category where we haven't seen as much activity, and I was curious how Amazon's shopping-specific assistant stacked up. I took Rufus for a test drive -- including asking for tips specific to Prime Day deals -- and found an AI assistant that was eager to help answer questions beyond shopping. I also discovered that it was better at diving into details about specific products than responding to broader queries, which is somewhat curious given the bucket loads of data Amazon has on its 200 million Prime members in the US. Plus, the ease of use leaves something to be desired. First off, you need the Amazon app. To use Rufus, look for the orange and blue icon in the bottom right-hand corner. Tap on it to ask Rufus a question by either typing your query or saying it out loud. Once you find products to purchase, you add them to your Amazon cart as usual. I wanted to start off easy, so I went with the product category that started it all: books. Given the season, I asked: What is a good summer beach read? As you can see in the image below, it seems like Rufus is relying on keywords to do the heavy lifting here. It suggested books like Beach Read, A Novel Summer and The Summer Place. I was curious how Rufus compares to Amazon's site search and Alexa, so I asked them about beach reads too. When I made the same query on-site, I got a completely different set of recommendations than what Rufus served up, including Carley Fortune's Every Summer After and Jan Moran's Seabreeze Inn. And when I asked Alexa, she said, "There are no books matching 'summer beach' in your Audible library." Rufus' response is almost comically keyword-driven, so I have to give the edge to the Amazon website on this one. I've reached out to Amazon for more insights into how Rufus does its job. I have a puppy with a birthday coming up, so next I asked: What should I get for my dog's first birthday? Rufus said, "Celebrate your furry friend's first birthday with special treats and toys! Look for durable chew toys, interactive puzzles and delicious dog treats made with high-quality ingredients." The response was less obviously keyword-driven, but it was still fairly generic. It included links to product categories, but those just took me to basic search pages on Amazon for those terms. By comparison, Amazon's on-site results seemed to be more focused on keywords here, offering up a selection of first-birthday bandanas and dog party packages with banners that say, "It's my bday, motherpuppers!" When I asked Alexa the same question, this was the answer: "On your dog's first birthday, it is customary to give them a toy as a present. This can be a stuffed animal, a ball, or any other item that is fun for dogs to play with." Alexa also offered additional dog facts, including average lifespan (in case I wasn't yet pondering my dog's mortality). My son has recently discovered the show Playdate with Winnie the Pooh on Disney Plus, and he's obsessed, so I asked Rufus: What are the best Winnie the Pooh products on Amazon? The response, shown above in part, wasn't terrible. However, once you click on a suggested link, it's hard to go back to the previous page -- it's like Rufus wants you to go further down a rabbit hole. When I asked the same question on-site and also put the same query to Alexa, I got a whole different range of Winnie the Pooh items, including different plush toys, a water bottle, a keychain, makeup and a backpack. So each platform seems to have a different idea about what "best" means. I recently finished a home improvement project, and since Rufus can supposedly make recommendations about the products you need for tasks like an at-home manicure, yoga and gardening, I decided to ask something I kind of already knew: What do I need to wallpaper a bathroom? "When selecting wallpaper for a bathroom, prioritize moisture-resistant and washable materials like vinyl or non-woven fabrics. Look for high scrubbability ratings and mold/mildew resistance to withstand humidity," Rufus said. It included nothing about paste, brushes, a straightedge or a box cutter in its first answer, but it did suggest that my next question should be, "What tools are needed for wallpaper installation?" And then it provided a better answer. But again, when you click on those product listings, you're taken to a generic Amazon search page, and it's hard to go back once you've clicked through on the first product. Alexa was also fairly helpful in terms of product recommendations for a wallpaper project. They both had better answers than the website, which offered up a vinyl decal that said "Bathroom" in cursive, along with a bunch of signs that said, "You never know what you have until it's gone," alongside an image of an empty roll of toilet paper. I have some bad news. I tried asking Rufus about the upcoming sales promotion in multiple ways, but the AI shopping assistant simply didn't know what to say beyond the basics. First, I asked: What are the best Prime Day deals for me? As you can see above, Rufus gave me a general nonanswer about a wide variety of products being discounted. Curiously, when I asked this question on site, Amazon recommended nothing but clothing -- including a tank top, linen pants and a linen shirt -- and though I have bought many products from Amazon over the years, I've never bought clothing there, beyond socks for my son. Alexa called out 10 results for deals, including two books -- The Greatest Beer Run Ever and We Were the Lucky Ones -- and a poster frame. I do actually buy a lot of frames from Amazon, so that latter one maybe actually made sense. I tried to broaden the query a bit: What are the best Prime Day deals? I got the same results as last time, from Rufus and Alexa. The Amazon site shook things up a bit with a toiletry bag, some storage bags -- and those same linen pants. I thought maybe asking about Prime Day deals as a whole was too big a challenge, given the scope, so I got more specific: Do you have any Prime Day deals on dog toys? Alas, Rufus could only say: "Prime Day is Amazon's biggest global shopping event, exclusively for Amazon Prime members, and will take place on July 16 and 17. Head over to the Prime Day page to learn more." Alexa and the website called up some dog toys, but nothing was tied to a specific Prime Day deal. I gave it one more shot: Will there be any Winnie the Pooh deals on Prime Day? But again, Rufus said: "Prime Day is Amazon's biggest global shopping event...." Alexa and the website called up some Winnie the Pooh products this time, but nothing was tied to a specific Prime Day deal -- and even if these deals aren't available yet, none of these tools were able to tell me that. Given the amount of data Amazon has on us and our search and purchase behaviors, I'm surprised not to see something more personalized for Prime Day. After all, it's kind of like a big garage sale, with a dizzying array of product deals. I know Amazon calls out some products for each of us on the homepage throughout the sale, but I feel like it would be helpful if Rufus or Alexa could help zero in on the products I'd be most interested in. Then again, maybe it's like candy and magazines at the checkout register -- Amazon wants you to browse and increase your basket size with the stuff you throw in your cart along the way. Amazon has some recommendations for using Rufus, which is where it's most helpful. Those includes questions like: How do I prepare for Prime Day? When is Prime Day? Are Prime Day Deals just for members? One of the suggested questions Rufus surfaced for me was: Which books are considered classics in literature? Rufus called out To Kill a Mockingbird, Pride and Prejudice, The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye and 1984, which isn't a bad list. Then it suggested I ask about the themes that literary classics explore, or what defines a book as a literary classic. And so Rufus' strength, for now, probably lies in those suggested queries. But Amazon says Rufus can tell you more about certain products, so I went back to the linen pants. Once on the product page, I asked: Each response asks for feedback, so you can rate it with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down and then check options boxes like, "This is inaccurate" or "This is irrelevant." Amazon says this will help Rufus get better over time. For now, I think Rufus is best once you have a specific product in mind rather than asking this new AI assistant to sort through the millions of products for sale on the site. Maybe by next Prime Day, it'll be able to answer more-personalized queries.

Shop smarter this Prime Day: Amazon's ChatGPT-like Rufus saves you time and money

The emergence of AI over the last few years has promised to paint a new image of the future ahead. However, in the meantime, Amazon believes it has found a way to use this tech to help shoppers find the best deals and products online, just in time for Prime Day 2024. Amazon Rufus is a new ChatGPT-like AI chatbot in the Amazon Shopping app designed to help make shopping on the company's digital marketplace easier than ever by providing up-to-date and detailed information on products and deals. Amazon's chatbot is very similar to how OpenAI's popular LLM (Large Language Model) ChatGPT works. Users can 'talk' to Rufus using natural language, and the chatbot uses its access to Amazon's vast catalog of content to help provide the best and most fitting answer. However, Rufus is far more advanced than automated chatbots that you may have encountered on various websites before. Rufus can answer in context, providing answers to almost everything you could wish to ask. That can mean finding you the best deal on air fryers big enough to feed a family of four or helping to bridge the generation gap with a list of Prime Day deals that make an excellent gift for those Gen Z younglings. Rufus is currently available to all US Amazon customers using the Amazon Shopping app (available on iOS and Android). Just make sure your app is up-to-date and tap on the Rufus chat bubbles at the bottom right of the app to begin your AI-assisted shopping this Prime Day. Of course, not everyone might be comfortable making purchasing decisions based on the guidance of a soulless machine whose entire purpose is to sell you things. While there's nothing wrong with making purchasing suggestions, it helps when there's a person behind those recommendations with genuine experience within that category -- if not hands-on experience with the product itself. Yes, technology has found impressive ways of getting information to us faster than ever before, but will anything ever truly replace the human element when it comes to making recommendations about what and when to buy? Can we say for certain that a human can challenge Rufus' expansive knowledge of every Amazon listing out there? Not at all. However, what Rufus can't do is understand the power and impact of a purchase on your day-to-day life while ensuring you get the most bang for your buck by purchasing the right product for the lowest price (even if that means stepping outside of Amazon's marketplace). As Laptop Mag deals editor Hilda Scott once taught me, "Friends never let friends pay full price for anything." And that's a motto we've run with for years of Prime Day, Black Friday, Back to School, and Holiday sales coverage. With Prime Day 2024 kick-starting tomorrow, there's never been a better time for potential buyers to look to the human element when making a purchase. At Laptop Mag we're hoping to make this year's Prime Day a positive one for you by providing expert recommendations on all of the products we've been privy to, reviewed, or taken a personal fancy to over the years. With that in mind, Rufus be damned, we've been hard are work pulling the best deals from around the web together in a number of roundups tailored to the tech-invested that cover everything from a general rundown of the best Amazon Prime deals to the best MacBook deals this Prime Day. So, If you prefer your buying recommendations to come with the experience of an expert, and not from the contents of a digital catalog, be sure to check out some of our fantastic work in rounding up the best deals for you ahead of Prime Day. We'll also be publishing spotlight deals throughout the week to ensure that our audience is clued up and in the know about some of the most impressive deals we come across this Prime Day, be it from Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart, Newegg, or any other digital retailer that's offering you the best bang for your buck.