Alexa is moving to Amazon.com

Amazon is bringing Alexa Plus to… Amazon.com,merge it AI Assistant Powered by LLM 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 bring up the expected list of brands, typing “what is a good skincare routine for men” or “when did you last order AA batteries” will now bring up an answer from Alexa.

Alexa is being replaced for shopping Amazon’s Rufus AI shopping assistant And unlike Rufus, it will be front and center in the Amazon app and website. According to the company, the AI ​​assistant will take over all of Rufus’ responsibilities and will bring in a few more.

At launch, Alexa for Shopping capabilities include setting up price alerts, comparing items, and automatically reordering products. It can automatically purchase items for you based on parameters you set, such as when something is below price at a specific time — “Add this sunscreen to my cart if the price drops to $10 and I haven’t bought it in the last two months.”

Alexa for Shopping can also checkout and shop on other websites for you, via Somewhat controversial agent Buy for me featureTrack product pricing history for an entire year, and automatically find products and deals for you with Scheduled Actions. All this can be done by simply saying what you want in the search bar.

The service does not require an Alexa account and is open to all Amazon customers in the United States, with availability increasing over the coming weeks, according to Daniel Rausch, 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.

Although Alexa for Shopping is a combination of Alexa and Rufus, the main differences between them are that it is “more integrated, more capable and available everywhere,” Rausch said. Edge In an interview. You can access the Assistant across all your Amazon and Alexa devices, creating “cross-device continuity.”

Additionally, he said, Alexa for Shopping has a broader scope, leveraging a series of models and logic to answer your questions. Along with information from Amazon.comit would pull from around the web and use whatever knowledge it had about the customer, “to come up with a very specific answer to your question,” Rausch said.

You’ll also get a more personalized experience if you have an Echo smart speaker or smart display, Rausch said, using the example of a science project. If you interact with Alexa Plus via a smart speaker, for example by asking for project ideas, when you go to Amazon.com and type “Show me what I need to buy for my science project,” Alexa for Shopping will get the context from that previous conversation. Additionally, if you set price alerts for products, you’ll receive them on your display devices and in the Amazon app.

The answers Alexa for Shopping generates will be more unique than what you currently get when you write a query to Amazon. If you’re considering a specific purchase, Alexa for Shopping can create a “shopping guide that compares features, prices, and reviews across Amazon and the web based on what matters most to you,” according to a blog post on Amazon.com.

Rausch shared an example of someone looking for the best headphones for travel. Typing that query will sort the results by travel features, then “Alexa will pop up, answer your question, and integrate it directly into one continuous shopping experience,” complete with AI-generated product comparisons and overviews from customer reviews.

The shopping experience on Echo Show smart displays also gets an upgrade with Alexa for Shopping. A new “fully integrated visual shopping experience” is now available on the Echo Show 15 and 21 and will be coming to the 8 and 11 next month, Rausch said.

Until now, the shopping experience on Show devices has been limited and mostly centered around audio. It will now feature Amazon’s full storefront, which lets 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 & Save settings, change the payment method or shipping address for your purchase, and filter product viewing by specific features using both methods.

Google and OpenAI It has rolled out features that use chatbots to help you buy things with mixed success. Rausch believes Alexa Plus is better positioned to deliver a complete, end-to-end experience, allowing you to go from idea to product in hand. “This kind of shopping experience is not a side hustle,” he said. “It’s not just putting together a couple of websites and thinking you can put together a one-stop shopping trip. Others have stumbled because it’s really complicated and requires deep time and attention to get something done.”

“Getting it done all the way is what customers want from AI and shopping,” he said. But accomplishing all of this would require customers to enter a lot of personal data into the service, thus placing a great deal of trust in that company. with Distrust of artificial intelligence is on the riseThis can be a big hill to climb.