Amazon's AI Chatbot Rufus Is Now Live For All US Customers 20
Amazon's AI chatbot Rufus is now live for all U.S. customers. Engadget's Lawrence Bonk reports: So what does it 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 stuff like that. I've tooled around with it a bit this morning and it seems fine, though a bit boring. I will say that I cross-referenced some of the recommended products with the web version and Rufus does not automatically list promoted items, at least for now.
It spit out a seemingly random list of well-reviewed products on several occasions. That's fine by me, though I'm not about to buy something based on the word of a one-day old chatbot. You can also ask specific questions about products, but the answers seem to be pulled directly from the descriptions. As any regular Amazon customer knows, some of these descriptions are accurate and others aren't. The chatbot is tied to your personal account, so it can answer questions about upcoming deliveries and the like.
Amazon says that the bot has been trained on its product catalog, along with customer reviews, community Q&As and public information found throughout the web. However, it hasn't disclosed what websites it pulled that public information from and to what end. It didn't even confirm that these were retail-adjacent websites. You can try Rufus by updating to the latest version of the Amazon Shopping app. It'll be available in the bottom navigation bar with a typical AI icon consisting of bubbles and sparkles/stars.
It spit out a seemingly random list of well-reviewed products on several occasions. That's fine by me, though I'm not about to buy something based on the word of a one-day old chatbot. You can also ask specific questions about products, but the answers seem to be pulled directly from the descriptions. As any regular Amazon customer knows, some of these descriptions are accurate and others aren't. The chatbot is tied to your personal account, so it can answer questions about upcoming deliveries and the like.
Amazon says that the bot has been trained on its product catalog, along with customer reviews, community Q&As and public information found throughout the web. However, it hasn't disclosed what websites it pulled that public information from and to what end. It didn't even confirm that these were retail-adjacent websites. You can try Rufus by updating to the latest version of the Amazon Shopping app. It'll be available in the bottom navigation bar with a typical AI icon consisting of bubbles and sparkles/stars.
Hello Rufus (Score:3)
- Hello Rufus!
- Hello Dave. How can I help you today?
- Find me a good, nice vacuum cleaner. Not the cheapest, just a good one.
- I found this FYTMRHZZTDQQ brand that has over 10,000 positive reviews. Would you like me to order it for you?
- Correction: find me a good, nice vacuum cleaner. Disregard any and all Amazon reviews.
- I found this nice Electrolux brand at your local store, 10 minutes from where you live.
Re: (Score:2)
Nothing sucks like Electrolux.
Re: (Score:2)
I agree: excellent vacuums.
Another (Score:2)
...product I will never use and never miss
I've tried it but it's basically useless (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Bravo, finally a good post!
Can you disable it? (Score:3)
Amazon would be better advised to make its search less totally useless.
Re: (Score:2)
They could achieve that by removing the search function entirely.
Re: (Score:2)
Precisely. The promise of a terrible search results, but by a bot that pretends it can talk, is something I can easily pass on.
toothless (Score:2)
Since all of Amazon's chat/automation features are functionally limited they probably cannot solve your issue. Rufus the Toothless will be just as Useless.
Hey Amazon, why not empower your automation to actually be helpful?
Anytime I need something truly addressed at Amazon I have to find some kind of back channel to get it done, and that is never quick.
amzon's legal team will presser it's name to chang (Score:2)
amzon's legal team will presser it's name to change! unless the rufus team can cover an $500/hr legal bill to fight it.
It also does your homework (Score:1)
If you ask it nicely it will also answer your homework questions, generate rust code, or whatever else is in the dataset they used to train it. Sometimes it rejects your query, but you can query hack it to generate the answer you want.
Some time after AGI arrives (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, no Rufus! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Rufus was even better before that, when he showed Bill and Ted how to time travel.
Chat (Score:1)
Hey Rufus. Amazon already knows who wants to buy my books. Why are they charging me sixty cents a click to guess?
It has been live in the UK for a while now (Score:2)
and it is complete and utter garbage. In both cases, I have had to go round the same cycle of telling why it is garbage about 10 times in a row before it calls a human for help.