Amazon merges Rufus and Alexa to create a new AI-powered shopping experience

To continue the analogy, you could say this is the chronicle of a death foretold.

Back in November, we already gave you a preview of Amazon’s plans to create a new shopping super-assistant built on the foundation it had developed with Rufus, its conversational AI. The proposal seemed logical: Amazon wanted Rufus to stop being just a simple chatbot that answered questions and become an agentic AI capable of taking actions on your behalf. Now, it has simply decided to take that evolution one step further.

Oh, and rebrand it as “Alexa for Shopping” (or Alexa para compras, if you prefer).

Which makes sense, given the value of leveraging the long-standing recognition of a brand as powerful as Alexa.

Poor Rufus.

Alexa for Shopping, a new name for a new shopping experience

At Amazon, they are not exactly familiar with the concept of false modesty, and they have chosen to introduce this new super-assistant as “the world’s best and most personalized AI shopping assistant,” initially available to U.S. customers through the Amazon Shopping app and website, as well as on Echo Show devices.

The idea is for this new Alexa for Shopping to combine capabilities from both Rufus (the shopping assistant) and Alexa+ (Amazon’s original voice assistant), in order to deliver a shopping experience tailored to what is expected in the new AI-driven era.

“By combining Rufus’s product expertise and Amazon shopping history with Alexa+’s personalized knowledge and context, Alexa for Shopping delivers a more personal and helpful shopping experience,” Amazon explains, adding that “customers can now explore and shop the entire Amazon store using voice, touch, or both.”

The proposal makes a great deal of sense, at least in the United States, where voice interaction with Alexa has been well established for years. It will also allow Amazon to draw on that extensive history of device conversations to personalize the shopping experience as much as possible and make the former Rufus’s work more effective.

As the company emphasizes, what customers share with Alexa will shape their shopping experience on Amazon, just as their conversations, browsing activity, and purchases on Amazon will make Alexa more useful. A two-way flow through which Amazon promises to “help you find the best products, compare categories and items, provide personalized recommendations and guidance, track prices, purchase items at your desired price, replenish essentials, manage your cart and shop across other online stores.” 

Yes, on other stores, you read that right.

Shopping on other stores: the new Alexa for Shopping features

For eligible products, the AI feature Buy for Me (which was already in beta for some customers) handles the entire purchase on the customer’s behalf using their primary address and credit card, outside Amazon. “When customers search for branded items in the Amazon Shopping app search bar, they will see relevant results from Amazon and third-party sellers in our store, and in some cases, additional relevant products from other stores in a separate section of search results called ‘Shop brand sites directly,’” the company explains.

Some of the other examples the company gives in its announcement are aimed at amplifying the wow factor of Alexa for Shopping’s new capabilities:

One of them is fairly logical and starts with a (stereotypical) situation straight out of an American TV series: “Your daughter has a school science fair coming up, and you start brainstorming ideas with Alexa on your Echo. You decide on making a homemade volcano. The next day, in the Amazon Shopping app, you ask Alexa: ‘Please suggest materials for the science fair project we talked about.’ Alexa recommends the materials for the homemade volcano, you add them to your cart, and they arrive at your doorstep that same afternoon.”

But that is a fairly simple case.

Let us remember that the U.S. version of Rufus was already capable of doing much more advanced things, including remembering preferences, products, and important dates… as well as the much more impressive shopping agent feature that allows it (although only for Prime customers), for example, to monitor a specific product’s price and buy it automatically as soon as it reaches the price the customer has set as desirable.

Now, in this new phase, the super-assistant can:

• Schedule your routine purchases. Through conversation, it lets you create a scheduled action, such as:
  • Add products of a certain type (“healthy snacks”) to your cart every month
  • Restock regular household items
  • Alert you about specific milestones (“when your favorite author releases a new book, or give you gift ideas before the birthdays and holidays of family and friends”)
  • Add a product to your cart when it meets certain conditions (“Add this sunscreen to my cart if the price drops to $10 and I have not bought it in the last 2 months”)
• Compare products directly from the search results, evaluating features, prices, and reviews to find the best option.
• AI-generated summaries at the top of search results in the Amazon Shopping app, giving you a quick overview of the product category and what to look for before you start browsing.
• Check the price history of products for up to a full year
• Shop conversationally... even with vague requests (“add my usual dog treats,” “add the cleaning products I buy frequently”)

This new Alexa for Shopping will be available in the United States starting next week, for all users, free of charge, with no need for Prime, an Echo device, or the Alexa app. 

Image: Amazon