Have you ever shopped on Amazon but were too lazy to read the user reviews at the bottom of a product listing? Well, you’re in luck, because Amazon recently implemented generative AI on its platform that will summarize reviews.
The company states that the AI tool will provide short paragraphs “on the product detail page” highlighting key features and overall “customer sentiment.” Customers can quickly scan the short block of text to get an idea of whether a product is good or not, instead of having to read dozens of reviews. Amazon states in its announcement you can steer the AI a bit by making it focus on specific ‘attributes’. Suppose you have one SmartTV that is easy to use. Users can select the “Ease of Use” tab to have the summarizer talk specifically about that attribute or something else like its performance while streaming content.
Ongoing work
Unfortunately, the AI feature wasn’t available to us because we were excluded from the rollout, but The Verge had access. In their report The edge claims it saw the tool appear in listings for “TVs, Headphones, Tablets, (Plus) Fitness Trackers.” It’s also not very consistent. They state that the summary is available on the Galaxy Tab A7, but not the Galaxy Tab A8. It also seems that Amazon’s AI strongly favors writing positive content because it “spends less time on the negatives”.
We’ve reached out to Amazon with several questions about the new tool, including whether there’s going to be a desktop version and whether the company plans to provide links directing users to the AI’s source reviews. Google’s SGE tool does this for the generated content it produces. It would be nice to see sources in the paragraph. However, Amazon has nothing left to share at this point.
Analysis: remain sceptical
Amazon has been dabbling in AI for a while now. In May, Amazon posted a job posting for a “machine learning focus engineer,” revealing that the company is looking for someone to help develop an “interactive conversational experience” for its search engine. We could see the Amazon search bar one day offering a ChatGPT-like experience where you talk to the AI when you search for a product.
It would be wrong of us not to add a little star to all this AI talk. As you may know, generative AIs are known to “hallucinate”, that is, sometimes provide inaccurate information. It has gotten to the point where some experts believe this problem will never be solved. So read the text of the summary text with a grain of salt. As it turns out, you just can’t beat old-fashioned human opinion, like the kind TechRadar gives out every day.
Labor Day is coming and that means savings. Be sure to check out TechRadar’s guide to Amazon’s Labor Sale for 2023. Price cuts on certain electronics are already live.