Amazon continues to develop its internal usage of AI services it eventually hopes to sell to other businesses. Instead of an AI that tries to read your mind based on past behaviour (we used to call those ‘marketing emails’) or simply shop for products on your behalf, this one will attempt to talk you into submission.
The online retail giant is testing new AI-generated audio summaries that shoppers can listen to instead of reading all that boring old text — a feature that’s certainly worth building a new data center over a protected wetland for.
Sounds of the Amazon
Rajiv Mehta, Amazon’s vice president of Search and Conversational Shopping, describes the new AI function as “new short-form audio product summaries on select product detail pages, with AI-powered shopping experts discussing key product features.”
“These AI shopping experts have done the research for you, analyzing product details, customer reviews, and information from across the web, then bringing product details to life and allowing customers to simply hear the highlights,” Mehta continued.
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The supposed benefits are that shoppers will feel like they’re conversing with a friend about purchases, allowing for online shopping when “multitasking or on the go.” That’s a handy benefit for Amazon, which will benefit from distracted shopping no matter how it’s done. Describe this process to a financial advisor, though, and you might induce a reflected-stupidity coronary on the poor fellow.
Using the still-in-testing feature is as simple as locating a product that has a ‘Hear the highlights’ button on the page. Pressing this will roll out the LLM (large language model) AI-generated script, giving you an overview of what to expect based on “Amazon’s product catalog, customer reviews, and information from across the web”. How it’ll account for responses like these user-answered questions about the Airzooka Air Blaster is anyone’s guess.
