Amazon Brings Rufus AI Shopping Assistant to All US Customers

Amazon.com Inc.’s artificially intelligent shopping assistant, Rufus, is now available to all US customers following five months of testing with a subset of consumers.

By tapping an icon in Amazon’s smartphone apps, shoppers can bring up a text chat interface and ask Rufus a range of questions, such as identifying durable outdoor speaker models, comparing running shoes or fetching order updates, the company said in a blog post on Friday.

The assistant was trained on Amazon’s catalogue as well as the web so it will also spit out biographies of celebrities, suggest which lakes to visit in Maine, or ...