Amazon extends AI shopping assistant Rufus to India

Amazon's AI assistant Rufus will be available to select customers on the Amazon.in mobile app starting today. It will be gradually rolled out to more customers in the coming weeks.

Amazon, on August 27, said it is extending a beta version of the company's artificial intelligence(AI)-powered conversational shopping assistant, Rufus, to India, nearly six months after its launch in the United States.

This rollout comes as the tech giant races to integrate generative AI features into its offerings, amid a growing competition among tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and Meta.

Amazon stated that the AI assistant will be available to select customers on the Amazon.in mobile app starting today, and will be gradually rolled out to more customers in the coming weeks.

The assistant,  first introduced in February 2024, is designed to help customers find products, answer queries on their shopping needs, compare products, and get recommendations among others.

Rufus will be available to customers on the bottom right of the app's main navigation bar, following which a chat dialogue box will appear on their screen. Customers can expand the chat dialogue box to see answers to their questions, tap on suggested questions, and ask follow-up questions.

This could be at start of a shopping journey where customers could ask queries such as “things to consider when buying a washing machine”, to comparisons such as “Should I get a fitness band or a smartwatch?” to more specific product-related questions such as “Are these durable?", Amazon said.

One can also search for and discover products based on activity, event, purpose, and other specific use cases by asking questions such as “gifting ideas for my wife’s birthday” or “what do I need to make dal makhani?".

Rufus will suggest shoppable product categories—from consumer electronics to Fashion and Beauty and Home Decor—and related questions that customers can click on to conduct more specific searches, it said.

Customers can return to the traditional search results at any time by swiping down to dismiss the chat dialogue box back to the bottom of the screen.

Amazon said Rufus generates answers using "relevant information from across Amazon.in and the web".

Rufus has been trained on Amazon's product catalog, customer reviews, community Q&As, and information from across the web, the company said.

"We will keep improving our AI models and fine-tune responses to continuously make Rufus more helpful over time," Amazon said in a blog post.

Amazon's rival Flipkart also launched a similar shopping assistant Flippi to its consumers in October 2023. The assistant is powered by OpenAI's ChatGPT. Meanwhile, Flipkart-owned Myntra offers a conversational AI-powered shopping assistant Maya that provides customised suggestions across fashion, beauty, and lifestyle products.

Over the past year, Amazon has introduced a series of generative AI-powered features and capabilities on the Amazon.in marketplace. This includes AI-generated review highlights that provides customers a quick snapshot of the common themes from dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of reviews at a glance.

The online retail giant is also leveraging this technology to make product listings more informative for customers by helping its selling partners write more engaging and effective titles and product descriptions, and improve existing listings.

"We are excited about the potential of generative AI and will continue testing new features to make it even easier to find and discover, research, and buy products in the Amazon.in marketplace" the company said in the blogpost.