GoKawiilis a senior reviewer with over twenty years of experience. She covers smart home, IoT, and connected tech, and has written previously for Wirecutter, Wired, Dwell, BBC, and US News.
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Amazon is bringing Alexa Plus to Amazon.com, integrating its LLM-powered AI assistant directly into the company’s shopping experience.
Beginning today, when you type a query into Amazon, you’ll be talking to Alexa for Shopping, the company’s new shopping assistant, powered by Alexa Plus. So, while a search for “toilet paper” will still return the expected list of brands, typing “What’s a good skincare routine for men” or “When did I last order 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 in the Amazon app and on the website. According to the company, the AI assistant will take over all of Rufus’s responsibilities and bring a few of its own.
Along with using the search bar to talk to Alexa for Shopping, the cursive “a” indicates other places you can interact with the shopping assistant. Image: Amazon
At launch, Alexa for Shopping’s capabilities include setting price alerts, comparing items, and automatically reordering products. It can auto-purchase items for you based on parameters you set, such as when something falls below a 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 go out and shop on other websites for you, via the somewhat controversial agentic Buy for Me feature, track a full year of price history for a product, and automatically look for products and deals for you using “scheduled actions.” All of this can be done just by 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 US, with availability ramping up 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.
While Alexa for Shopping is a merging of Alexa and Rufus, its key differences are that it’s “more deeply integrated, more capable, and available everywhere,” Rausch told The Verge in an interview. You can access the assistant across all of Amazon and Alexa devices, creating “cross-device continuity.”
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