Amazon just rolled out something new that taps into your personal shopping habits and aims to make those endless product searches a little less overwhelming.
The latest offering, called Help me decide, uses artificial intelligence to sift through your previous browsing, purchases, and searches, weighing all those clicks and choices before suggesting items you actually want.
Let’s say you have been looking at camping gear, eyeing four person sleeping bags and toasty boots. The new feature steps in and recommends an all season tent sized just right, nudging you toward something that matches the rest of your camping checklist. At first, suggestions stick close to the price range you are viewing, but you can also opt to see more frugal or splurge options if you are open to variety.
If you find yourself sifting through pages of similar products, that is when the Help me decide button will appear, usually just as decision fatigue begins to kick in. The button also pops up under Keep shopping for at the top of your home screen, easy to tap when you are ready for guidance.
Smarter Shopping with AI
Daniel Lloyd, Amazon’s vice president of personalization, put it simply in a statement: “Help Me Decide saves you time by using AI to provide product recommendations tailored to your needs after you’ve been browsing several similar items, giving you confidence in your purchase decision.”
The brains behind the tool combine large language models, generative AI from AWS known as Bedrock, search capabilities from OpenSearch, and the company’s own recommendation service SageMaker.
Shoppers in the United States can try out the feature on the Amazon app for iPhone and Android or on the website.
AI-driven upgrades are not new for Amazon. Last year, it unveiled new echo lineup with smarter AI features, a conversational assistant that can chat about products and answer common questions, and then later introduced AI-influenced guides for more than a hundred categories.
New functionality has kept coming fast. Early in the year, Amazon began rolling out bite sized audio product and review summaries, and in September, users saw camera based suggestion tool that finds matches for whatever you point your phone at.
Other tech giants are racing alongside Amazon. Google, OpenAI, and Perplexity have also poured resources into smart shopping tools, hoping to give buyers more confidence with every swipe and tap.
