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Journalism of Courage
Although e-commerce platforms like Amazon have made shopping easier, the plethora of options and categories can also make them confusing. With hundreds of product options, it’s difficult to choose the right one. Amazon has been integrating AI into its shopping experience for a while now, with features like summarised reviews and customised product recommendations. To further enhance the shopping experience, Amazon has introduced an AI chatbot called Rufus. Currently in beta, Rufus is available to select Android and iOS users in India.
Amazon says users can ask questions about specific products such as “things to consider when buying a washing machine,” or “should I get a fitness band or a smartwatch?” and Rufus will answer these, and recommend products based on the user’s interests.
Amazon’s Rufus is clearly modelled and trained to be a shopping-first AI chatbot, where it would browse the expansive catalogue to answer queries and suggest the right set of products.
Other than the fact that Rufus can help you clear doubts about specific products, if you are buying a smartphone, Rufus will also let you shortlist the products using specific parameters like battery, display size, performance, storage, and more.
When we asked about WearOS smartwatches with the highest battery life, Rufus suggested the OnePlus Watch, which is partially correct. However, it isn’t very precise, as the OnePlus Watch 2R (review) or the OnePlus Watch 2 would have been the right answer. However, it did recommend the right product, OnePlus Watch 2R, given you would overlook the sponsored smartwatches, which don’t even run WearOS.
When we asked Rufus to find the cheapest foldable smartphones, they recommended the OnePlus Open, which is one of the cheapest foldable smartphones, however, phones like the Z Fold4 currently cost slightly less than the OnePlus Open.
However, in some cases, the results from Rufus were far from true, and it recommended discontinued devices like the Asus Zenfone 9 and Realme 9 Pro+ 5G when asked about smartphones with the highest battery life, which isn’t the case.
In fact, directly searching on Amazon leads us to better recommendations. This simply means the good old blogs and websites are still the best place to find the right product recommendations, at least for the consumer tech segment.
