In February this year, Amazon launched their own AI chatbot called Rufus, and it is housed in the Amazon app. From that month until now, the application is in the testing phase and has recently entered the beta phase specifically for Amazon customers in the United States.
Rufus is a Chatbot designed to provide a more effective and enjoyable shopping experience. It can answer customer questions about as products listed on Amazon. At the same time, the generative AI that supports it has been trained using Amazon's product catalog.
In addition to providing users with product recommendations that can be purchased and also details about those products, Rufus can also inform Amazon customers about products that are in transit or being delivered to the customer's home. This reduces the need for Amazon customers to refresh the website to see the location of purchased items.
Amazon says that the Rufus speech model has been trained using content from Amazon's own platform, including from product pages and even comments left on their platform. Open website content was also used to train the model, but no details were given about what websites were used.
As said before, Rufus is now entering the beta testing phase and can be used by Amazon customers in the United States so far. For now there is still no information about the use in other markets.