People are evidently never buying quite enough stuff from Amazon to keep the company entirely happy, and it’s calling on AI once again to push indecisive shoppers into locking down the purchase they’ve been eyeing up. The new tool, which Amazon calls Help Me Decide, gives shoppers in the US personalized recommendations of products they should buy by analyzing their browsing history, searches and preferences.
It’s designed to “help” customers who have been looking at a number of products in a particular category, such as wireless headphones, to decide which one best suits their needs. The Help Me Decide button will pop up on a product detail page when it detects that you’ve been browsing for a while without making a final choice. If you choose to tap for AI assistance, it will pull together all the information it can find on your relevant shopping history and recommend the product it deems the right choice for you. It also recommends an alternative upgrade pick and a similar product for those on a budget.
Help Me Decide can also group together related searches. Amazon uses the example of the tool recommending an all-season tent for four people based on you previously looking for adult and kids’ sleeping bags that keep you warm, camping accessories and children’s hiking boots. The recommendation it chooses includes an explanation of why it’s the best pick for you based on its features and your previous purchases, and pulls in customer reviews to back it up. This suggests that how useful the recommendations are will ultimately come down to how much you take notice of customer reviews.
When searching for products to recommend to you, Help Me Decide leverages Amazon’s Bedrock and SageMaker machine learning platforms, as well as its OpenSearch tool, to marry up all the different factors it takes into consideration. It follows the introduction of the Interests tool earlier this year, which uses AI to generate shopping results based on your natural language prompts. Back In May, the company also started experimenting with AI-generated hosts that can summarise products for you before you buy them, again relying heavily on customer reviews for its information.
Help Me Decide is live in the US now and can be found in the Amazon app (iOS and Android) and mobile browser. If you tap “Keep shopping for” it should show up, and will do the same on a product detail page after you’ve looked at a number of products in a related category.
