Amazon is bringing Alexa Plus to Amazon.com, integrating its LLM-powered AI assistant directly into the company’s shopping experience.
Starting today, when you type a query into Amazon, you’ll talk to Alexa for Shopping, the company’s new shopping assistant, powered by Alexa Plus. So, while searching for “toilet paper” will still return the expected list of brands, typing “what’s a good skin care routine for men” or “when was the last time I ordered AA batteries” will now trigger an answer from Alexa.
Alexa for Shopping is replacing Amazon’s Rufus AI shopping assistant and unlike Rufus, it will be front and center on the Amazon app and website. According to the company, the AI assistant will handle all the responsibilities of Rufus and will also bring some of its own responsibilities.
At launch, Alexa’s capabilities for shopping include setting price alerts, comparing items, and automatically reordering products. It can automatically purchase items for you based on criteria you set, such as when something drops below price at a specific time — “Add this sunscreen to my cart if the price drops to $10 and I haven’t purchased it in the last 2 months.”
Alexa for Shopping can also shop for you on other websites through the somewhat controversial Agent Buy for Me feature, track a full year’s price history for a product, and automatically look for products and deals for you using “scheduled tasks.” All this can be done by simply saying what you want in the search bar.
The service doesn’t require an Alexa account and is open to all Amazon customers in the U.S., with availability expanding in the coming weeks, according to Daniel Roush, vice president of Alexa and Echo. Along with the main search bar, the Alexa for Shopping assistant will also live in a dedicated Alexa for Shopping chat window.
While Alexa for Shopping is a merger of Alexa and Rufus, its main differences are that it is “more deeply integrated, more capable, and available everywhere,” Roush explained. The Verge in an interview. You can access the Assistant across all Amazon and Alexa devices, creating “cross-device continuity.”
Additionally, he said Alexa for Shopping has a broader scope, leveraging a range of models and logic to answer your questions. With information from Amazon.com, it will take information from across the Web and use any knowledge it has about the customer to “find a very specific answer to your question,” Roush said.
If you have an Echo smart speaker or Show smart display, you’ll also get a more personalized experience, Roush said, using a science project example. If you interact with Alexa Plus on a smart speaker, such as asking for ideas for a project, when you go to Amazon.com and type “show me what to buy for my science project,” Alexa for Shopping will have a reference to that previous conversation. Additionally, if you set up price alerts for products, you’ll receive them on your Show device and the Amazon app.
The answers provided by Alexa for Shopping will be more fully displayed than the answers you currently get when typing a question to Amazon. According to a blog on Amazon.com, if you’re considering a specific purchase, Alexa for Shopping can create “a shopping guide that compares features, prices, and reviews on Amazon and the web based on what’s most important to you.”
Roush shared an example of someone looking for the best headphones for travel. Typing in that query will sort the results by travel features, and then “Alexa will pop up and answer your question and turn it into a continuous shopping experience,” he said, with AI-generated overviews from product comparisons and customer reviews.
The shopping experience on the Echo Show smart display is also getting an upgrade with Alexa for shopping. A new “fully integrated visual shopping experience” is now available on the Echo Show 15 and 21, Roush said, and will come to 8 and 11 devices next month.
To date, the shopping experience on Show devices has been limited and mostly voice-centric. It will now feature a full Amazon Store interface, letting you use both voice commands and touch on the smart display to navigate the store. Rausch said you’ll be able to adjust things like subscribe and save settings, change the payment method or shipping address for a purchase, and filter the product view based on specific features using both modalities.
Google and OpenAI have introduced features that use chatbots to help you buy things, with mixed success. Roush believes Alexa Plus is better positioned to provide a complete end-to-end experience, allowing you to go from an idea to a product. “This type of shopping experience is not an additional discovery,” he said. “It’s not just scouring some websites and thinking you can do a shopping journey from start to finish. Other people have faltered because it’s really complicated and requires deep time and attention to do something.”
“What customers want should be delivered through AI and shopping,” he said. But for it all to work, customers would have to feed a lot of personal data into a service, and by extension, trust that company a lot. With distrust of AI on the rise, this could be a major challenge.
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