If there's one tech innovation that our bank accounts didn't need in 2024, it's an Amazon chatbot with infinite knowledge of the site's array of potential impulse buys. But unfortunately for our savings, that's exactly what we've just been given in the form of Rufus.
Amazon says its Rufus chatbot has now launched in the US in beta form to “a small subset of customers” who use its mobile app, but that it'll “progressively roll out to additional US customers in the coming weeks”. Rufus is apparently “an expert shopping assistant” who's been trained on Amazon's product catalog and will help answer your questions in a conversational way.
Rather than Googling for extra advice on the differences between trail and road running shoes, the idea is that you can instead search for pointers in the Amazon app and Rufus will pop up with the answers.
Quite how good those answers are remains to be seen, as Amazon says they come from “a combination of extensive product catalog, customer reviews, community Q&As, and information from across the web”. Considering the variable quality of Amazon's reviews, and the tendency of AI chatbots to hallucinate, you may still want to cross-reference your research with some external sources.
Still, it's an early glimpse at the future of shopping, with retailers looking to arm you with all of the information you need so you can, well, spend more money with them. Amazon says that the questions can be as broad as “what are good gifts for Valentine’s Day?”, but also as specific as “is this cordless drill easy to hold?” if you're on a product page.
How to find and use Rufus
Right now, Rufus is only being made available to “select customers when they next update their Amazon Shopping app”. But if you live in the US and are keen to take it for a spin, it's worth updating your iOS or Android app to see if you're one of the early chosen ones.
If you are, the bar at the top of the app should now say “search or ask a question”. That's where you can fire conversational questions at Rufus, like “what to consider when buying headphones?”, or prompts like “best dinosaur toys for a 5-year-old“ or “I want to start an indoor garden”.
The ability to ask specific questions about products on their product pages also sounds handy, although this will effectively only be a summary of the page's Q&As and reviews. Given our experience with AI shopping chatbots so far, we'd be reluctant to take everything at face value without double-checking with another source.
Still, with Rufus getting a wider US rollout in “the coming weeks”, it is a pretty major change to the Amazon app – and could change how we shop with the retail giant. Amazon will no doubt be hoping it convinces us to spend more – maybe we need two chatbots, with the other one warning us about our overdraft.
Amazon is reportedly testing a new AI assistant on its mobile app that can answer customer questions about specific products.
This feature appears to have been initially discovered by e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse. According to the firm, the AI can be found under the “Looking for specific info?” section on product pages. The LLM (large language model) powering the feature relies on listing details provided by companies and user reviews to generate responses to inquiries. For example, you can ask if a particular workout shirt is good for running or if it fits well on a tall person. Marketplace Pulse states its main purpose is to save people the trouble of having to read individual reviews by summarizing all the information present into a succinct block of text.
(Image credit: Marketplace Pulse/Amazon)
Because it’s in the early stages, the AI assistant is limited in what it can do. You can’t command it to compare two items or “find alternatives.” Although it can’t recommend specific products, Amazon’s chatbot can make soft suggestions. In another example, MarketPlace Pulse asked the app assistant if e-bikes are good for romantic dates. The AI said “not really” and recommended buying a tandem bike instead.
Quirks and unintended features
There are several quirks affecting the chatbot. Unsurprisingly, it’s “prone [to] hallucinating wrong information” about an item. MarketPlace Pulse even claims it outright refused to “answer basic questions”. What’s more, the assistant is capable of answering prompts that apparently “Amazon didn’t build it for.”
It can generate Python code, write jokes about a product, or answer in languages besides English. CNBC had access to the test and was reportedly successful in describing items “in the style of Yoda from Star Wars.” Despite these abilities, you can’t hold a regular conversation with the AI like you could with ChatGPT.
(Image credit: Marketplace Pulse/Amazon)
It’s unknown how widespread the test is. We didn't have access on our phone. Amazon hasn’t said anything official so far, but we reached out to the platform asking for more information about the AI. We also asked Marketplace Pulse if it knows whether the assistant is available to a lot of people or just a select group. This story will be updated at a later time.
Alexa upgrade
Amazon’s AI ambitions don’t stop there as a report from Business Insider reveals the tech giant is currently working on a revamped and paid version of Alexa. The upgrade is called Alexa Plus, which is said to offer a “more conversational and personalized” experience akin to ChatGPT.
The team is aiming to launch Alexa Plus on June 30, according to the report. Unfortunately, development is not going smoothly. A source with intimate knowledge told Business Insider the revamp is “falling short of expectations”. The AI is reportedly hallucinating false information as the team is having a hard time getting the tech to work properly. The project may also be causing a lot of internal fighting with some arguing people are not going to want to pay for another Amazon service.
At a glance, it seems Alexa Plus might miss the June 30 deadline.
Thanks to a recent update, Facebook and Instagram users are now able to link their profiles to their personal Amazon accounts and do some online shopping on the social media websites.
The update comes as part of an apparent new partnership between Instagram and Facebook parent Meta and Amazon, however, neither company made a formal announcement letting everyone know of the changes. It appears to have been first “leaked” by Maurice Rahmey, co-CEO of Disruptive Digital, who shared his findings on LinkedIn. He states that Meta will utilize information obtained from Amazon to show users products that might interest them. If a user has an Amazon Prime membership, they will receive tailored ads with extra details such as “real-time pricing [plus] shopping estimates.” An Amazon representative told TechCrunch customers will even see specific details about a product and whether or not they’re eligible for Prime benefits.
There are some restrictions to the feature. It will only show “select products” on Meta’s platforms, but the products won’t be restricted to only what Amazon sells on its storefront. You will see independent sellers too. Be aware this update is only available to people in the United States.
Rolling out
It's unclear if the Amazon ads are currently live.
We didn’t encounter any changes on our personal Facebook and Instagram accounts at the time of this writing. Nor were we able to connect our Meta profiles to the shopping platform. This seemed strange at first because both Maurice Rahmey as well as TechCrunch have videos on their respective posts revealing what the ads look like. They even demonstrate how to buy a product from one of them. Additionally, Rahmey claimed on his LinkedIn post that the refresh had “just rolled out” so we should’ve run into them.
We reached out to both companies asking when people are going to see the ads. An Amazon spokesperson told us they are “available on a growing number of” products which we take to mean the patch is slowly making its way to users. Over time, you should see them crop up. It’s unknown if there are plans to expand this partnership outside the United States.
Both brands stayed quiet when we asked this question. It probably won't happen in Europe. Ireland’s Data Protection Commission recently banned “Meta’s social media platforms from using targeted ads” across the entire European Economic Area. This includes all EU countries, Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway.
Amazon might be mulling a subscription charge for Alexa’s AI features at some point down the road – though that may not be for some time yet, by the sound of things.
This nugget of info emerged from a Bloomberg interview with Dave Limp, who is SVP of Amazon Devices & Services currently, though he is leaving the company later this year. (Whispers on the grapevine are that Panos Panay, a big-hitting exec who just left Microsoft, will replace Limp).
Bloomberg’s Dave Lee broadly observed that the future of Alexa could involve a more sophisticated AI assistant, but one that device owners would need to fork out to subscribe to.
This would be an avenue of monetization, giving that the previous hope for spinning out some extra cash – having folks order more stuff online using Alexa, bolstering revenue that way – just hasn’t worked out for Amazon (not in any meaningful fashion, at least).
After Limp talked about Amazon pushing forward using generative AI to build out Alexa’s features, Lee fired out a question about whether there’ll come a time when those Alexa AI capabilities won’t be free – and are offered via a subscription instead.
Limp replied in no uncertain terms: “Yes, we absolutely think that,” noting the costs of training the AI model (properly), and then adding: “But before we would start charging customers for this – and I believe we will – it has to be remarkable.”
Analysis: Superhuman assistance?
Dave Limp (above) is currently SVP of Amazon Devices & Services, but is leaving the company later this year. (Image credit: Future / Lance Ulanoff)
So, there’s your weighty caveat. Limp makes it clear, in fact, that expectations would be built around the realization of a ‘superhuman’ assistant if Amazon was to charge for Alexa’s AI chops as outlined.
Limp clarifies that Alexa, as it is now, almost certainly won’t be charged for, and that the contemporary Alexa will remain free. He also suggested that Amazon has no idea of a pricing scheme yet for any future AI-powered Alexa that is super-smart.
This means the paid-for Alexa AI skills we’re talking about would be highly prized and a long way down the road for development with Amazon’s assistant. This isn’t anything that will remotely happen soon, but what it is, nonetheless, is a clear enough signal that this path of monetization is one Amazon is fully considering traveling down. Eventually.
As to exactly what timeframe we might be talking about, Limp couldn’t be drawn to commit beyond it not being “decades” or “years” away, with the latter perhaps hinting that maybe this could happen sooner than we may imagine.
We think it’ll be a difficult sell for Amazon in the nearer-term, though. Especially as plans are currently being pushed through to shove adverts into Prime Video early next year, and you’ll have to pay to avoid watching those ads. (As a subscriber to Prime, even though you’re paying for the video streaming service – and other benefits – you’ll still get adverts unless you stump up an extra fee).
If Amazon is seen to be watering down the value proposition of its services too much, or trying to force a burden of monetization in too many different ways, that’ll always run the risk of provoking a negative reaction from customers. In short, if the future of a super-sophisticated Alexa is indeed paying for AI skills, we’re betting this won’t be anytime soon – and the results better be darn impressive.
We must admit, we have trouble visualizing the latter, too, especially when as it currently stands, we can’t get Alexa to understand half the internet radio stations we want to listen to, a pretty basic duty for the assistant.
During a recent live event, Amazon revealed Alexa will be getting a major upgrade as the company plans on implementing a new large language model (LLM) into the tech assistant.
The tech giant is seeking to improve Alexa’s capabilities by making it “more intuitive, intelligent, and useful”. The LLM will allow it to behave similarly to a generative AI in order to provide real-time information as well as understand nuances in speech. Amazon says its developers sought to make the user experience less robotic.
There is a lot to the Alexa update besides the LLM, as it will also be receiving a lot of features. Below is a list of the five things you absolutely need to know about Alexa’s future.
1. Natural conversations
In what may be the most impactful change, Amazon is making a number of improvements to Alexa’s voice in an effort to make it sound more fluid. It will lack the robotic intonation people are familiar with.
You can listen to the huge difference in quality on the company’s Soundcloud page. The first sample showcases the voice Alexa has had for the past decade or so since it first launched. The second clip is what it’ll sound like next year when the update launches. You can hear the robot voice enunciate a lot better, with more apparent emotion behind.
2. Understanding context
Having an AI that understands context is important because it makes the process of issuing commands easier. Moving forward, Alexa will be able to better understand nuances in speech. It will know what you’re talking about even if you don’t provide every minute detail.
Users can issue vague commands – like saying “Alexa, I’m cold” to have the assistant turn up the heat in your house. Or you can tell the AI it’s too bright in the room and it will automatically dim the lights only in that specific room.
3. Improved smart home control
In the same vein of understanding context, “Alexa will be able to process multiple smart home requests.” You can create routines at specific times of the day plus you won’t need a smartphone to configure them. It can all be done on the fly.
You can command the assistant to turn off the lights, lower the blinds in the house, and tell the kids to get ready for bed at 9 pm. It will perform those steps in that order, on the dot. Users also won’t need to repeat Alexa’s name over and over for every little command.
(Image credit: Amazon)
4. New accessibility features
Amazon will be introducing a variety of accessibility features for customers who have “hearing, speech, or mobility disabilities.” The one that caught our interest was Eye Gaze, allowing people to perform a series of pre-set actions just by look at their device. Actions include playing music or sending messages to contacts. Eye Gaze will, however, be limited to Fire Max 11 tablets in the US, UK, Germany, and Japan at launch.
There is also Call Translation, which, as the name suggests, will translate languages in audio and video calls in real-time. In addition to acting as an interpreter, this tool is said to help deaf people “communicate remotely more easily.” This feature will be available to Echo Show and Alexa app users across eight countries (the US, Mexico, and the UK just to mention a few) in 10 languages, including English, Spanish, and German.
Through the Character.AI tool, users can engage in “human-like voice conversations with [over] than 25 unique Characters.” You can chat with specific archetypes, from a fitness coach to famous people like Albert Einstein.
Music production will be possible, too, via Splash. Through voice commands, Splash can create a track according to your specifications. You can then customize the song further by adding a vocal track or by changing genres.
It’s unknown exactly when the Alexa upgrade will launch. Amazon says everything you see here and more will come out in 2024. We have reached out for clarification and will update this story if we learn anything new.
Along with the impressive demonstrations and sounds of alarm that have come with the dawn of generative-text chatbots, we’re also now seeing some of the more questionable and perhaps less desirable outcomes starting to materialize.
Authors and several news outlets have recently reported a significant uptick in AI-generated books showing up in multiple best-seller lists, many seemingly sounding like nonsense.
Self-publishing, such as via Amazon’s Kindle Direct Program, has become a way for many genuine authors to bring their work to the public and build a following without the help of a large publisher. Because these self-publishing capabilities are purposely easy to sign up for, it seems anyone can generate endless AI-written books and upload them to be sold on Amazon’s eBook store and make them available for reading via Kindle Unlimited.
Recently, an indie author, Caitlyn Lynch, tweeted about noticing that only 19 of the best sellers in the Teen & Young Adult Contemporary Romance eBooks top 100 chart on Amazon were real, legit books. The rest were nonsensical and incoherent, and seemingly AI-generated.
The AI bots have broken Amazon.Take a look at the Best Sellers in Teen & Young Adult Contemporary Romance eBooks top 100 chart.I can see 19 actual legit books.https://t.co/fy9rtV6Ck6The rest are AI nonsense clearly there to click farm.@AmazonKDP what are you doing about it? pic.twitter.com/cziuKcQrq3June 26, 2023
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The Motherload website later looked into dozens of books on the platform and saw that a few days after Lynch’s tweets, the AI books had vanished from the best-seller lists, probably removed by Amazon.
They were, however, still available for purchase, and had enjoyed a significant amount of visibility before vanishing. Also, as Lynch very understandably speculates, the mass uploading of AI-generated books could be used to facilitate click-farming, where 'bots' click through a book automatically, generating royalties from Amazon Kindle Unlimited, which pays authors by the amount of pages that are read in an ebook. So, it doesn’t matter that these books disappear. The people running such a scheme could just upload as many as they like to replace the removed ones.
A major concern quickly emerges both for authors and readers – most of us readers are seeking out books that, at least for now, are written by human authors, and this makes it harder to find those kinds of books. Lynch, elaborating on her views in a Twitter thread, emphasized that this “will … be the death knell for Kindle Unlimited” if Amazon cannot contain this.
(Image credit: Amazon)
What is Amazon doing about it?
Motherboard reached out to Amazon and received a reply that stated that it had “clear guidelines” for which books can be listed for sale and would investigate when concerns are raised in order to protect both readers and authors. It didn’t explicitly state that it was making an effort specifically to address the apparent spam-like persistent uploading of nonsensical and incoherent AI-generated books. It’s worth Amazon taking an active approach to rectify this issue in order to reassure readers that it’s worth continuing to support authors via ebook sales and page views (which result in royalties for authors on Kindle Unlimited), and reassure authors that it’s worth putting their work on sale on Amazon.
We’ve also contacted Amazon to find out what it is doing about this, and we’ll update this story when we hear back.
AI-generated and assisted books aren’t totally new, and followed quite quickly after the debut of text-generator and image-generator Artificial Intelligence tools such as ChatGPT and Midjourney. These books were already contentious, as many artists and authors felt that such generated books denigrated the work it takes to put together, write, and publish a book.
Furthermore, AI generators work by scraping huge amounts of visual and text content from the internet – some of which the creators of this content never consented to.
Mass-flooding of best-seller lists with nonsensical books will only intensify these concerns of quality control and authenticity. It’s not clear why there is such a boom in AI-generated books appearing in best-seller lists, but many speculate that it’s due to bot-farming, where large amounts of books are automatically generated and published. In my opinion, if this is the case then it’s definitely up to Amazon to address this problem, as authors and readers don’t have the technical capabilities to counteract such operations.
That can then lead to one AI-written book using text from another AI-written book, without any fact-checking, and (especially in the instance of non-fiction books), a worrying feedback loop is created that spreads misinformation and makes it hard to pin down the origin of statements.
For now, maybe Amazon will optimize its process of removing AI-generated nonsensical content as it appears, but greater efforts are needed. As of May 2023, Amazon’s Kindle Publishing didn’t require sellers to disclose if the book had been written (or illustrated) with the help of AI generators such as ChatGPT or Midjourney.
There's also a big problem that continues to plague Amazon and other online marketplaces for a multitude of products, and books are no exception: fake reviews. Text AI generators make this worse by making it easier to flood a review section both in the content and quantity. With Prime Day coming up, make sure you check out our guide on how to spot fake reviews on Amazon.
Unfortunately, along with all the positive new things that are possible with AI generators, inevitably, they can also be misused. Hopefully, Amazon acknowledges the growing concerns coming from both authors and readers, and makes efforts that help set a precedent for protecting human-created works – and their audiences.
Amazon has renewed its war on fake reviews by developing new AI-powered tools to help tackle the problem, but the retail giant admits they aren't enough to solve the issue on their own.
In a new blog post, Dharmesh Mehta, who's Amazon's VP of Worldwide Selling Partner Services, writes “we must work together to stop the fake review brokers that are the source of most fake reviews”, calling on “private sector, consumer groups, and governments” to work together to stop the brokers.
What are these so-called 'fake review brokers'? Amazon says the brokers have become an industry in recent years, and have “evolved in an attempt to evade detection”. They work by approaching average consumers though websites, social media or encrypted messaging services and getting to them write fake reviews “in exchange for money, free products, or other incentives”.
Amazon says it's using increasingly sophisticated AI tools and machine learning to stem the tide. These fraud-detection programs apparently analyze thousands of data points, including sign-in activity and review history, to help spot fake reviews. The figures involved are pretty staggering; Amazon says that last year it blocked over 200 million suspected fake reviews in 2022, and sued over 10,000 Facebook group administrators.
But Amazon's financial might and its increasingly sophisticated AI tools seemingly aren't enough to stop fake reviews. The retail giant says that because much of the misconduct happens outside of Amazon’s store “it can be more challenging to detect, prevent, and enforce these bad actors if we are acting alone”.
(Image credit: Amazon)
So Amazon has made a three-point plan to get some extra help. Firstly, it wants there to be more cross-industry sharing about fake review brokers and their various tactics and techniques. Secondly, it wants governments and regulators to use their authority more to take action against bad actors.
And lastly, in a veiled nudge at Meta and other social media giants, it's asked that “all sites that could be used to facilitate this illicit activity should have robust notice and takedown processes”. Amazon wants to work with “these companies” (read Facebook, WhatsApp, Signal and more) to help improve their detection methods.
Whether or not these three steps are realistic remains to be seen, but the message from Amazon is clear – it doesn't think it can stem the tide of fake reviews on its own, and that's a problem for all of us. Until that improves, it's more important than ever to follow advice on how to spot fake Amazon reviews during Prime Day and other big shopping events.
How to spot fake Amazon reviews
Sites like ReviewMeta (above) can help you weed out suspicious reviews from an Amazon product’s rating (Image credit: Future)
We've been highlighting the problem of fake Amazon reviews for over a decade, and it's clear that the issue has become a game of whack-a-mole – while Amazon's tools have improved, the retail giant admits that the “tactics of fake review brokers have also evolved in an attempt to try to evade detection”.
This is a big problem for the average online shopper – in the UK, the consumer group Which? says that around one in seven reviews are fake. And that means you can be misled into buying poor-quality products.
Mehta's blog post is a reminder than even the world's biggest tech giants, and the latest AI technology, aren't powerful enough to stop fake reviews. And that means we all need to be increasingly savvy when shopping online.
As our in-depth guide to spotting fake Amazon reviews highlights, there are some simple red flags to look out for in product reviewers, including “overly promotional language, repeated reviews, and reviews for an entirely different product”.
But there are also handy third-party tools like ReviewMeta and FakeSpot (which was recently bought by the Firefox owner Mozilla) that can help you use AI to detect fake reviews and scams. These allow you paste in Amazon product URLs to get an analysis of the reviews or use Chrome extensions for a quick check.
While Amazon's three-point call-out for outside help is understandable, recent history suggests that progress is going to be slow – which means we'll all need to remain on guard when doing our online shopping, particularly during big events like Amazon Prime Day 2023.
Top website builder Wix has upgraded its SaaS platform with the integration of Amazon’s Multi-Channel Fulfillment (MCF) for ecommerce merchants to deliver orders within one to two days.
Using Amazon’s order fulfillment services, the redeveloped platform will now allow Wix ecommerce merchants in the US to download the Amazon MCF app to their Wix store and hopefully lower fulfilment costs.
Wix merchants will also be able to automatically see shipping speed options and real-time delivery dates from Amazon.
Wix Multi-Channel Fulfillment
Wix says the integration has also been introduced to reduce the complexities ecommerce website owners face fulfilling orders on their own.
“We’re constantly improving our platform to accommodate rising needs of business owners and to help them increase their Gross Payment Volume (GPV),” said Arik Perez, Head of Wix ecommerce.
“Today, seamless shipping and delivery are essential for businesses to succeed. In partnering with Amazon MCF, Wix merchants can be assured that top-of-the-line packing, handling and fast shipping is at their fingertips, which ultimately boosts the potential growth of their business.”
Some of the other key benefits for Wix ecommerce merchants using the Amazon MCF app include fulfilling orders 24/7 with fast shipping, leveraging Amazon MCF’s fulfillment network with over 200 fulfillment centers and automatic inventory placement.
“We’re continually listening to merchants and working backwards from their needs to develop solutions that help them delight more customers,” said Gopal Pillai, Vice President of Amazon Fulfillment and Distribution Solutions.
“The new Multi-Channel Fulfillment app easily integrates with Wix stores to help merchants make critical improvements to their customer experience, such as providing shoppers accurate delivery dates at checkout, automatic tracking emails, and on-time, low-cost delivery.
“With Multi-Channel Fulfillment, we make fulfilment so easy and seamless that merchants can focus more time on the growth and success of their business.”
Available now, the integration with Amazon’s MCF network will mean that Wix merchants will pay for fulfilment and storage, but not for commitment or app installation.
Top website builder Wix has upgraded its SaaS platform with the integration of Amazon’s Multi-Channel Fulfillment (MCF) for ecommerce merchants to deliver orders within one to two days.
Using Amazon’s order fulfillment services, the redeveloped platform will now allow Wix ecommerce merchants in the US to download the Amazon MCF app to their Wix store and hopefully lower fulfilment costs.
Wix merchants will also be able to automatically see shipping speed options and real-time delivery dates from Amazon.
Wix Multi-Channel Fulfillment
Wix says the integration has also been introduced to reduce the complexities ecommerce website owners face fulfilling orders on their own.
“We’re constantly improving our platform to accommodate rising needs of business owners and to help them increase their Gross Payment Volume (GPV),” said Arik Perez, Head of Wix ecommerce.
“Today, seamless shipping and delivery are essential for businesses to succeed. In partnering with Amazon MCF, Wix merchants can be assured that top-of-the-line packing, handling and fast shipping is at their fingertips, which ultimately boosts the potential growth of their business.”
Some of the other key benefits for Wix ecommerce merchants using the Amazon MCF app include fulfilling orders 24/7 with fast shipping, leveraging Amazon MCF’s fulfillment network with over 200 fulfillment centers and automatic inventory placement.
“We’re continually listening to merchants and working backwards from their needs to develop solutions that help them delight more customers,” said Gopal Pillai, Vice President of Amazon Fulfillment and Distribution Solutions.
“The new Multi-Channel Fulfillment app easily integrates with Wix stores to help merchants make critical improvements to their customer experience, such as providing shoppers accurate delivery dates at checkout, automatic tracking emails, and on-time, low-cost delivery.
“With Multi-Channel Fulfillment, we make fulfilment so easy and seamless that merchants can focus more time on the growth and success of their business.”
Available now, the integration with Amazon’s MCF network will mean that Wix merchants will pay for fulfilment and storage, but not for commitment or app installation.
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