Amazon Unveils 'Help Me Decide': AI-Powered Shopping Assistant

Amazon's new AI shopping tool tells you why you should buy a recommended product | TechCrunch

Amazon has been stuffing AI features into its shopping experience for the past few years now. Today, the company unveiled a new feature called "Help me decide," which takes into account your searches, browsing and shopping history on Amazon to suggest products and describe why a particular product is right for you For example, if you're shopping for a camping tent, and have looked at sleeping bags for four people, stoves, and have bought camping boots, Help me decide would suggest an all-season, four-person warm tent. The tool will initially stick to the price range you're currently browsing, but it can also suggest cheaper or more expensive items if you choose to see more options. Amazon says the "Help me decide" button will show up after a user has browsed through many similar listings. The button is also located under the "Keep shopping for" option at the top of the homepage. "Help Me Decide saves you time by using AI to provide product recommendations tailored to your needs after you've been browsing several similar items, giving you confidence in your purchase decision," Daniel Lloyd, vice president of personalization at Amazon, said in a statement. Amazon said it is using large language models along with AWS' generative AI app service, Bedrock, search service OpenSearch, and recommendation service SageMaker for the tool. The feature will be available to consumers in the U.S. on the Amazon Shopping app on iOS and Android, and on the web. Over the past year, the e-commerce company has implemented multiple shopping tools to drive more purchases. Last year, it introduced an AI assistant Rufus, which sought to help answer user questions about products. Then in October 2024, it added AI-powered shopping guides for over 100 categories, and this year, it started providing audio product and review summaries. And then in September, it debuted Lens Live, which lets users point their phone camera at things around them in the world and get product suggestions on Amazon.

Not sure what to buy? Amazon's latest shopping tool can help you decide - here's how it works

After your recommendation, you have budget and upgrade options. If wading through online reviews and trying to compare specifics between products gives you decision paralysis, Amazon has a new tool to help. Amazon has announced a new tool called "Help Me Decide" that assists you in finding the perfect product for your needs. Also: Your Amazon deliveries got 3 major upgrades. Here's what's new (and why you'll want to try it) As the company explains, the feature uses AI (large language models and AWS services like Amazon Bedrock, Amazon OpenSearch, and Amazon SageMaker) to analyze product details and customer reviews and then accounts for your previous purchases and personal preferences to make a recommendation specific to you. For example, Amazon says, if you're shopping for a camping tent, Help Me Decide will analyze the tents you've viewed plus other details from your shopping history. If you've browsed for both adult and kids' sleeping bags for very cold temperatures and also shopped for stoves for car camping, Help Me Decide knows you're planning a family camping trip and might recommend a four-person tent that's big enough for everyone. Amazon says recommendations will include an explanation as to why the tool recommended that item for you. This is just the latest in Amazon's AI-powered innovations to help you shop. The AI-powered "Interests" feature scans for new products matching your personalized prompts and notifies you about new items, the "Shopping Guides" feature simplifies research by compiling expert guidance and product recommendations, and the site's AI shopping assistant, Rufus, answers your questions about products in real time and even accesses previous orders. Amazon didn't say how the AI will choose which products to recommend or whether there will ultimately be paid placements or partnerships; I've reached out for more information. When you use the Amazon Shopping app or the Amazon mobile browser, the Help Me Decide button appears after you've viewed several similar items. (You can also go directly to it by tapping "Keep shopping for" at the top of the homepage.) Also: Your Amazon driver may start showing up with smart glasses on - why that's a good thing Tap the button, and you'll see a product recommendation. If you want more options, you can also see an "upgrade" or "budget" pick. Get the morning's top stories in your inbox each day with our Tech Today newsletter.

Amazon's latest attempt at selling stuff with AI is the 'Help me decide' button

Amazon is launching a new AI-powered tool that's supposed to help you choose which product to buy. Now, when you look at multiple similar items on Amazon's app or mobile website, it may display a "Help me decide" button that picks one for you based on your browsing activity, searches, shopping history, and preferences. As an example, Amazon says if you're buying a new camping tent, its AI tool will make a suggestion based on the tents you've viewed and your other shopping history. That means it might suggest an all-season four-person tent if you've previously browsed for adults' and kids' sleeping bags for cold temperatures or purchased kids' hiking boots. It's just one of the few AI tools on Amazon designed to encourage you to buy more products. Last year, it launched an AI chatbot called Rufus to talk you through purchases and rolled out a tool that creates AI-generated buying guides. More recently, Amazon launched Lens Live AI, which scans everything in your room using your phone's camera and finds matching products on Amazon. Despite all of these new tools, I've really only found myself using Amazon's AI review summaries. The "Help me decide" button is rolling out to millions of users in the US. It will appear in the top-right corner of the Amazon Shopping app or in a mobile browser when you've viewed several similar items. Press it, and Amazon will display a recommendation, along with a summary of why it chose the product. You can also check out an affordable "budget pick" selected by the tool, as well as a more expensive "upgrade option."

Amazon calls on AI once again with its new 'Help Me Decide' shopping tool

People are evidently never buying quite enough stuff from Amazon to keep the company entirely happy, and it's calling on AI once again to push indecisive shoppers into locking down the purchase they've been eyeing up. The new tool, which Amazon calls , gives shoppers in the US personalized recommendations of products they should buy by analyzing their browsing history, searches and preferences. It's designed to "help" customers who have been looking at a number of products in a particular category, such as wireless headphones, to decide which one best suits their needs. The Help Me Decide button will pop up on a product detail page when it detects that you've been browsing for a while without making a final choice. If you choose to tap for AI assistance, it will pull together all the information it can find on your relevant shopping history and recommend the product it deems the right choice for you. It also recommends an alternative upgrade pick and a similar product for those on a budget. Help Me Decide can also group together related searches. Amazon uses the example of the tool recommending an all-season tent for four people based on you previously looking for adult and kids' sleeping bags that keep you warm, camping accessories and children's hiking boots. The recommendation it chooses includes an explanation of why it's the best pick for you based on its features and your previous purchases, and pulls in customer reviews to back it up. This suggests that how useful the recommendations are will ultimately come down to how much you take notice of customer reviews. When searching for products to recommend to you, Help Me Decide leverages Amazon's Bedrock and SageMaker machine learning platforms, as well as its OpenSearch tool, to marry up all the different factors it takes into consideration. It follows the introduction of the tool earlier this year, which uses AI to generate shopping results based on your natural language prompts. Back In May, the company also started with AI-generated hosts that can summarise products for you before you buy them, again relying heavily on customer reviews for its information. Help Me Decide is live in the US now and can be found in the Amazon app (iOS and Android) and mobile browser. If you tap "Keep shopping for" it should show up, and will do the same on a product detail page after you've looked at a number of products in a related category.

Amazon Rolls Out New AI Tool to Help You Become an Even More Mindless Consumer

America is the home of the mindless consumerâ€"a nation of cash-hungry dolts who, as George Carlin once put it, are trained to spend "money they don't have on things they don't need." And it's true that buying stuffâ€"especially buying stuff onlineâ€"can be a pretty mindless activity. However, it can also be quite a lot of work. It can take hours to find the right product and, more often than not, when you get it into your living room and unbox it, you're still dissatisfied. Well, now, the few mental faculties it does require to buy stuff online will be cleanly automated away with a new artificial intelligence option from Amazon. On Thursday, Amazon launched Help Me Decide, a tool that uses generative AI to analyze your buying habits, and then, if you're stuck on what particular item to splurge on, it will just make the decision for you. "Help Me Decide uses AI to analyze your browsing history and preferences to recommend the right product for you with just one tap," the product's announcement says. "The tool helps customers pick the right product, quickly," it adds. The feature will present itself as a pop-up in the top right corner of your screen if you've been scrolling just a little too long for a particular product, Amazon says. If you decide to use it, the feature willâ€"like the e-commerce giant's other automated featuresâ€"use algorithms to analyze your buying activity. It then supposedly selects the product that is "right" for you. Lest you think that Amazon will reflexively push you towards more expensive items, the company promises that it will provide you with a variety of price tiers, including "an upgrade pick and a budget option" (who knows whether they will be trustworthy or not, though). "Help Me Decide saves you time by using AI to provide product recommendations tailored to your needs after you’ve been browsing several similar items, giving you confidence in your purchase decision,†said Daniel Lloyd, vice president of Personalization at Amazon. “Help Me Decide continues to build on our commitment to use AI to improve the customer experience by creating tools that make shopping easier and more enjoyable.†In some sense, this is, yes, convenient, in that the hours that you might typically spend scanning Amazon and trying to decipher the difference between ten nearly identical products can now be greatly reduced. At the same time, it can't help but feel like yet another step down the stupidification ladder that we are all collectively descending. AI can now write emails for you and read them to you. It can compose a message to a Tinder date, and tell you what to say when you're actually on the date. And, yes, it can also decide what you want to buy and, if you programmed an AI agent correctly, could buy it for you too. To be clear, no one said AI is good at doing any of those things, but it can do them.

Amazon Has a New Way to Sort Through All Those Listings

Amazon's new way to cut through the clutter is a new AI-powered feature called 'Help Me Decide'. This tool recommends a product for you with just one tap, and it bases this on your shopping and browsing history as well as other factors. The good part is that Amazon doesn't just hand you a random pick; the recommendation comes with a clear explanation of why it's the right choice for your specific needs. It highlights relevant features, pulls in key insights from customer reviews, and explains how the product aligns with your previous purchases. For example, if you're browsing for a new camping tent and the AI sees you recently bought cold-weather sleeping bags for the kids and a large car camping stove, it might recommend an all-season, four-person tent that's warm and spacious enough for your whole family. Amazon's Vice President of Personalization, Daniel Lloyd, believes this product is more than necessary. He said, "Help Me Decide saves you time by using AI to provide product recommendations tailored to your needs after you've been browsing several similar items, giving you confidence in your purchase decision." Lloyd is pretty clear that this is directed at those who need more help navigating through all the listings Amazon has. I have a great time looking at deals, comparing products, and making sure that what I am getting is what's best to get. I window shop for fun, and so I'd have no use for something like this, but not everyone likes to do this. This button is made for those who came to buy a product or have an idea of what they want and don't like spending an hour researching or cutting through the fluff. The Help Me Decide button will pop up automatically at the top of the product detail page after you've viewed several similar items. You can also get to it by tapping "Keep shopping for" on the Amazon homepage. Just in case you're still a little hesitant about the main recommendation, the tool will also come with the ability to "upgrade pick" and a "budget option" for you to keep the recommendations coming. There are far too many listings on Amazon, so this is a good way to keep from being overwhelmed by too many choices. Still, it is starting to feel like we have too many AI features on Amazon that do nearly the same thing. Amazon should start to think about consolidating some of these features. For example, Amazon has Shopping Guides, which are meant to give you expert advice and product recommendations for hundreds of different product types. There's also the Interests feature, which scans for new products that match your personalized prompts and preferences. These sound too similar to keep going alongside yet another AI meant to give you recommendations. One AI feature that Amazon has that should be kept and would help after you're given a recommendation is Rufus. Rufus answers questions about product details and comparisons, and I can see a future where you're recommended a product and Rufus tells you more about it if you ask. The 'Help Me Decide' is now available those in the U.S. in the Amazon Shopping app for iOS and Android, as well as on mobile browsers. Source: Amazon

Amazon's new Help Me Decide button picks what you were going to buy anyway - just faster

The AI makes and explains its personalized suggestions using browsing history and customer reviews Amazon wants to use AI to reduce the exhaustion online shopping can sometimes induce. The new Help Me Decide button, now appearing in the United States on mobile browsers and Amazon's app, promises to cut to the chase and pick the ideal product for you to buy. No more infinite tab hopping through endless reviews. The button appears after you've been browsing a few similar products at the top of the page. Tapping it sends you to a personalized recommendation based on your browsing history, shopping patterns, and existing customer reviews. And the AI will break down why it's the ideal choice for you, including relevant features and references to your past purchases. If you want to weigh your options a bit more, it'll also show you a cheaper alternative and a fancier upgrade. The button is only the latest effort by Amazon to incorporate AI into its shopping experience, like the recently released Lens Live shopping tool. The button resembles a simplified version of the "Interests" feature, alerting you to products you might care about and the AI-generated personalized "Shopping Guides." It's like a preset conversation with Amazon's AI conversational shopping assistant, Rufus, in some ways. But what makes Help Me Decide different from those tools - and, indeed, rival AI shopping features offered by the likes of Google Gemini or ChatGPT - is its assertiveness. Instead of relying on the age-old suggestions based on what people who bought something also liked, the AI interprets your intent and narrows things down to what seems to be the best for you as an individual. It looks at context, not just the keywords in a search. For instance, if you've been looking at photography equipment, it won't just recommend more and more cameras. It might suggest special lenses or even frames for the photos you take, with strong customer reviews mentioning nature photography. That ability to combine current context with historical behavior could make it one of Amazon's most persuasive shopping features yet. and also its most subtly influential. The company positions it as a time-saver: a way to eliminate indecision and close the loop between intent and action. And in fairness, that's exactly what it might be for many shoppers. But it's worth pausing on how powerful this kind of nudging could become. You've probably already experienced a more passive version of this system in the form of those uncanny recommendations from Amazon that seem to have listened to your most private conversations or the very thoughts in your head. Help Me Decide takes it further by being specific and identifying the exact product (the AI determines) you were probably going to choose anyway. For many people, this is a dream come true. Shopping, especially online, can feel like trying to pick a favorite leaf in a forest. No matter how good the filters, reviews, and star ratings are, it can still be exhausting. So the idea of pressing one button and getting (the right) answer might feel like magic. The fact that it comes with a written rationale makes it more trustworthy. But it also shifts shopping from you choosing the product to choosing whether to accept the product the AI chose for you. That's something akin to hiring a personal shopper, interior decorator, or event planner, but without the human interactions that lead you to trust their understanding of your taste. Some people may find that comforting. Others may feel pushed. There's also the matter of data. Help Me Decide relies on deep, individualized behavioral patterns. Amazon knows what you search for, what you click on, how long you hover, and what you eventually buy. Now, it's using that data not just to recommend, but to select. The more confident and accurate the suggestions become, the harder it is to know whether your preferences are shaping your behavior -- or the other way around. Still, from a usability standpoint, it's hard to deny the feature's appeal. The time savings alone are valuable. Whether the future of AI-led shopping sounds exciting or eerie depends on your relationship with shopping and AI. And not even the Help Me Decide button can pick which attitude best suits you.

Okay, Amazon's new AI shopping feature is actually pretty helpful

Amazon is well aware that you're spending hours agonizing over the reviews for seven different near-identical toaster ovens before you actually make a decision. Now, it has an AI feature for that -- and we have to admit, it's pretty helpful. "Help me decide" is a new AI shopping function that rolled out on October 23 across millions of U.S. customers on the Amazon shopping app and mobile browser. It uses large language models and AI tools from Amazon Web Services' (AWS) suite of offerings to analyze your shopping history, purchase details, and preferences, and then match those insights with product details and customer reviews to recommend products that you might be most interested in. Designed to cut down on shopper indecision and usher users straight to the checkout cart, the feature is a smart move for Amazon, and it might make holiday shopping a bit less tortuous for customers. As the world's most popular online retail site continues to roll out new AI features, it's serving as a proving ground for how AI is radically reshaping online shopping as we know it. How to use Amazon's new "Help me decide" feature To try out "Help me decide," you can either navigate to the "Keep shopping for" tab on the Amazon homepage, or just click on a bunch of related products until you see a black pop-up with a sparkle icon.

Amazon launches new AI shopping tool in US for the indecisive

(Bloomberg) -- Amazon.com Inc. is rolling out a new AI-powered tool that will recommend a specific product when shoppers are feeling overwhelmed with options. The feature, called Help Me Decide, will automatically appear at the top of a product detail page after shoppers have looked at several similar items, suggesting they need help. Those who tap the button will see a single product recommendation based on their shopping history. The tool, available on Amazon's smartphone app or through a mobile browser, uses large language models to recommend a product by matching a shopper's purchase history with product descriptions and reviews. Amazon's algorithm generally considers a customer's buying history while recommending products and showing ads during a search, according to analysts and consultants who work with merchants on the e-commerce platform. The company also introduced an AI chatbot assistant, Rufus, to all US customers in 2024. While shoppers can use a variety of Amazon tools to research products during a search on the e-commerce site, Help Me Decide will offer one product "with a clear explanation of why it's a great choice," the company said. A shopper can also choose to see more expensive and cheaper options. For example, Help Me Decide might recommend an all-season, four-person tent if a person browsing tents has previously purchased cold-weather sleeping bags and hiking boots for their children, according to Amazon. Initially, the tool will be available to "millions" of US consumers picked randomly, suggesting a limited test to see how it performs and whether shoppers use it. Amazon said it will roll the tool out more broadly in the coming months. Technology companies and retailers are experimenting with ways to use artificial intelligence to transform the shopping experience, which is still largely powered by search engines that reveal a mix of advertised products and organic results in response to queries. Large language models have the potential to speed up the process by letting shoppers enter more precise searches that can be further refined while chatting with bots. More than a third of shoppers said they've used artificial intelligence tools for product research, recommendations and finding deals, according to a survey of 5,000 people conducted in September by Adobe Inc. Walmart Inc. earlier this month announced a partnership to let shoppers browse and purchase products from Walmart on OpenAI's popular ChatGPT chatbot, an alliance that poses a threat to Amazon's position as a leading online destination where US consumers begin looking for products. More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com

Amazon introduces AI-powered 'Help Me Decide' shopping feature By Investing.com

Investing.com -- Amazon has launched a new AI-powered shopping feature called "Help Me Decide" that helps customers quickly select products with a single tap. The feature, announced Thursday, analyzes users' browsing history, searches, shopping patterns, and preferences to recommend the most suitable product. It appears as a button at the top of product detail pages after a customer has viewed several similar items, or can be accessed through the "Keep shopping for" section on the homepage. When activated, Help Me Decide provides a personalized recommendation with clear explanations of why the product matches the customer's needs, highlighting relevant features and insights from customer reviews. "Help Me Decide saves you time by using AI to provide product recommendations tailored to your needs after you've been browsing several similar items, giving you confidence in your purchase decision," said Daniel Lloyd, vice president of Personalization at Amazon. The technology uses large language models and AWS services including Amazon Bedrock, Amazon OpenSearch, and Amazon SageMaker to process user data and match it with product information. For example, if a customer is shopping for a camping tent and has recently viewed sleeping bags for cold temperatures and large stoves for car camping, the feature might recommend an all-season, four-person tent suitable for family adventures. Help Me Decide also offers upgrade and budget alternatives for customers who want to explore more options. The feature is currently available to millions of U.S. customers on the Amazon Shopping app for iOS and Android, as well as on mobile browsers. This addition expands Amazon's suite of AI shopping tools, which already includes the Interests feature that notifies customers about products matching their personalized prompts, Shopping Guides that provide expert guidance, and Rufus, an AI shopping assistant that answers real-time questions. This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.