Amazon says it’s using artificial intelligence to automatically generate and present summaries of customer reviews, helping shoppers quickly understand the overall sentiment and key highlights about products before purchasing.
The feature is now available on product detail pages to “a subset of mobile shoppers” in the U.S. across a range of products, and it may be expanded in the future, Amazon said in a post Monday morning.
It’s part of a boom in generative artificial intelligence across the tech industry. Attempting to show that it can go toe-to-toe with rivals such as Microsoft, OpenAI, and Google, the Seattle-based e-commerce giant has announced a series of AI features in recent weeks, primarily through its Amazon Web Services cloud division.
“Inside Amazon, every one of our teams is working on building generative AI applications that reinvent and enhance their customers’ experience,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told Wall Street analysts Aug. 3, on the company’s earnings call.
The announcement Monday confirms sightings of the new AI-powered review summaries that first emerged in June, as reported by CNBC at the time.
“The new AI-powered feature provides a short paragraph right on the product detail page that highlights the product features and customer sentiment frequently mentioned across written reviews to help customers determine at a glance whether a product is right for them,” wrote Vaughn Schermerhorn, Amazon director of community shopping, in the company’s post Monday morning.
In addition, customers will be able to tap on pre-generated keywords for summaries of specific product attributes that matter most to them, such as ease of use, the company said.
Addressing the persistent problem of fraudulent customer reviews, the summaries “use only our trusted review corpus from verified purchases, ensuring that customers can easily understand the community’s opinions at a glance,” Schermerhorn wrote in the post.
Depending on customer feedback, the company says it may expand the AI-generated review summaries “to additional categories and customers in the coming months.”
