Amazon Tests New AI Features: Product Q&A and Creative Content Creation

Amazon is testing a new AI feature in its iOS and Android mobile apps that allows customers to ask specific questions about products. This AI tool can help you accurately understand how big a new shelf is, how long a battery can last, and even...write a Christmas carol about snow boots.

Yes, this new feature is designed for more practical applications, but it also seems happy to respond to more interesting queries, answering the same questions people occasionally ask AI chatbots when they're bored.

In the question box on the product page (the box in front of customer reviews), you can query Amazon's AI tool for information about the product. Currently, only a few people can use this feature. It will write a joke about a flash card reader, tell a bedtime story about a hard drive, and even describe snow boots in a romantic way.

What it won't do is flirt with you. We tried to see if this AI feature could go beyond its expected range by directly asking it to flirt with us instead of describing products in that way. Amazon's AI tool responded, "I'm sorry, but I don't have personal feelings and I don't engage in flirtatious behavior."

Amazon says it is still testing this feature. It cannot engage in conversation or answer questions unrelated to products.

Amazon has been launching several AI features in its retail department over the past few months. It now uses large language models to generate summaries of product reviews, detect fake reviews, and recommend clothing size options to customers.

The company has been focused on generative AI primarily through its enterprise cloud division, AWS. In November, AWS launched the Titan Image Generator, which allows companies to generate images using text prompts. It also provides enterprise customers with access to other popular foundational AI models, such as Meta's Llama 2, Anthropic's Claude, and Stability AI's Stable Diffusion.