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.
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.”
Additionally, he said Alexa for Shopping has a broader scope, leveraging a series of models and reasoning to answer your questions. Along with information from Amazon.com, it will pull from across the web and use any knowledge it has about the customer, “figuring out a very specific answer to your question,” said Rausch.
You’ll also get a more personalized experience if you have an Echo smart speaker or Show smart display, said Rausch, using a science project example. If you interact with Alexa Plus on a smart speaker, say by asking for ideas for the project, when you go to Amazon.com and type in “show me what I need to buy for my science project,” Alexa for Shopping will have the context from that previous conversation. Additionally, if you set price alerts for products, you will receive them on your Show devices and in the Amazon app.
The answers Alexa for Shopping generates will be more fully featured than what you currently get when typing in a query to Amazon. If you’re pondering a specific purchase, Alexa for Shopping can create “a shopping guide comparing features, prices, and reviews across Amazon and the web based on what matters most to you,” according to a blog on Amazon.com.
Rausch shared an example of someone looking for the best headphones for travel. Typing in that query will sort the results by travel features, and then “Alexa pops up and answers your question and builds it right into one continuous shopping experience,” he said, complete with product comparisons and AI-generated overviews from customer reviews.
The shopping experience on the Echo Show smart displays is also getting 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 devices in the next month, said Rausch.
To date, the shopping experience on Show devices has been limited and mostly voice-centric. Now it will feature a full Amazon store interface, 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 and Save settings, change the payment method or shipping address for a purchase, and filter a product view by specific features using both modalities.
Google and OpenAI have rolled out features that use chatbots to help you buy things with mixed success. Rausch believes Alexa Plus is better positioned to offer a full end-to-end experience, allowing you to go from idea to a product in hand. “This type of shopping experience is not a side quest,” he said. “It’s not just scraping a couple of websites and thinking you can pull together some end-to-end shopping journey. Others have stumbled because it’s really complex and it requires deep time and attention to get something done.”
“Getting all the way to done is what customers want from AI and shopping,” he said. But getting all the way to done will require customers to feed a lot of personal data into a service, and by extension, place a lot of trust in that company. With distrust of AI on the rise, that could be a big hill to climb.
