Shopping can be tough if you don’t already know what you want. Even if you do know, it can be hard to get all the details while sifting through thousands of reviews or digging through product specs. Thankfully, Amazon’s new AI helper, Rufus, can help streamline the process in many ways.

Rufus is Amazon’s Helpful AI on the Amazon Mobile App

Rufus can help ease the burden of shopping online in many ways. It can answer specific questions about products, search Amazon for certain types of items, summarize pros and cons mentioned in product reviews, and more. For now, Rufus is only available on the Amazon mobile app, not their regular website. So if you want to take it for a spin, you’ll need the app. Once the app has been installed, tap little orange and blue button in the bottom right corner of your mobile app to launch Rufus.

The funny thing is, Rufus can also do a lot of things it probably isn’t supposed to do. Even though its purpose is to aid you with your shopping questions on Amazon, it can actually answer totally unrelated questions just like a normal chatbot. I’ve gotten it to give me estimates on the time required to drive from Boston to New York and even give general medical advice. That said, I wouldn’t recommend using Rufus for that.

You’ll be much better off playing to its strengths, using it to recommend clothing sizes, summarize product descriptions, and the like. That said, bear in mind that Rufus, like all generative AI, is not perfect. They can make mistakes and confidently present incorrect information. In my experience, Rufus tends to get most things right, but there have been a few cases where it messes up and doesn’t even realize it.

I wouldn’t take the word of Rufus on something so important that getting it wrong will ruin everything, but it’s still a helpful tool. As for how exactly that tool can help you, there are many ways it can make your shopping experience simpler and more enjoyable.

Request Generated Summaries of Customer Reviews

If you’re like me, you don’t really trust product descriptions that hype up the item you’re looking for. After all, a seller is trying to make money, so they aren’t going to tell you about the shortcomings of their product, and they’ll always do their best to make it sound awesome. This is where customer reviews come in: no one is more honest about their experience than a customer who is displeased with their purchase.

That said, it can take a lot of time to read through dozens or even hundreds of reviews, especially if you want to try and get the perspectives of both the one-star and the five-star reviews. Rufus can help you out with this. While on the product page for the item you are interested in, open up Rufus and ask it to summarize reviews. Usually, it will give you a fairly basic summary that points out commonly praised aspects of the item.

For instance, I asked Rufus to summarize reviews for a vacuum cleaner, the Shark Navigator NV356E. The initial review summary was brief, mentioning that reviews commonly praised the light weight, strong suction power, and great maneuverability. To get a more robust summary, all I had to do was ask Rufus for more details. After that, it covered all sorts of things talked about in the reviews, including accessories, the dust cup, the self-cleaning brush roll, and more.

It’s probably still worth it to check out the poor reviews for an item you are interested in, but using Rufus to get review summaries gives you a great initial impression of the product and what’s good or bad about it. That said, how useful this is all depends on how much you trust the reviews left for the product in the first place.

Ask Specific Questions About Product Specifications

Have you ever had a tough time finding out whether or not a product has some niche feature you really care about? Whether or not the item is rechargeable, or if the hoodie you’re looking at has a sherpa lining? Sometimes, that information is just buried in the description somewhere. Other times, it’s seemingly not mentioned at all. Whatever the case, you can ask Rufus to find this information for you if need be.

Now, Rufus can’t pull up information that doesn’t exist. For instance, there were a few hoodies I was looking at in which the product description didn’t explicitly specify what fabric the lining was made of. Even if I ask Rufus, there is nothing for it to draw on. That said, if someone in the reviews mentions it, the AI helper can get an answer from there too.

If you search for a particular product or open up a product page and then go to Rufus, it will also automatically suggest some popular product questions asked by other people. For example, when I was looking at a flat-screen TV, Rufus recommended some popular questions, such as “how intuitive is the smart platform to navigate” and “does it support Dolby Atmos audio format?”

These suggestions are helpful, because sometimes you don’t even know what you need to know about the product until you’re prompted to ask the right questions. At any rate, Rufus is very helpful with providing answers to specific questions about products if you can’t find the answer yourself. Just make sure you double-check the information if it’s really important that it’s absolutely right. After all, a lot of product reviews on Amazon are written by AI too, so that could lead to misinformation.

General Assistance Like Order Status, Product Categories, and More

You can also use Rufus to give you more general assistance while shopping on Amazon’s mobile app. For instance, I’ve bought a couple of presents for my family this year, and it can be annoying to keep track of their order status: like whether they’ve shipped, their estimated delivery dates, or been canceled. All you have to do to get all that information is ask for order status with Rufus. If you’re signed in to your account, that info will get pulled up swiftly.

Rufus is also quite helpful if you don’t have an exact product in mind, but you do know what type of product you want. I’m very particular about my hoodies, and I want them to have zippers and sherpa lining. I can mention those specific details to Rufus, and it’ll pull up a variety of hoodies that meet my parameters. If I want to get more specific, I can tell Rufus to only show certain brands too.

Using Rufus like this is a pretty great way to generate ideas if you aren’t sure exactly what you want. That said, you might have to put some work into your prompt to get the types of items you want, but the more specific you can get, the better your recommendations will be.

Even after all of that, you can also talk to Rufus for general advice about products. You could ask about who a gift might be a good fit for, inquire about recipes, or even discuss how certain products might help you out with a home improvement project.

There are many ways this new AI helper on Amazon’s mobile app can add value to your shopping experience. There’s undoubtedly even more you could do than what I’ve talked about here today. Just remember that AI isn’t infallible, and can sometimes make very convincing mistakes. After all, it’s not really artificial intelligence, despite the name.

Be sure to double-check its output when it’s really important, and use it only as a helper, not a replacement for your own product vetting.