Amazon.com Inc. is rolling out an artificial intelligence feature called Interests to help users discover products in its e-commerce marketplace.

Daniel Lloyd, the company’s vice president of personalization, detailed the capability in a Tuesday blog post. It’s the latest in a series of consumer-focused AI features that the company has introduced since the start of the year.

To use Interests, shoppers must enter a natural language overview of the products they wish to buy. A prompt can describe a specific type of item or a broad merchandise category such as “computer accessories.” Users can also input related details such as their pricing preferences. From there, Interests generates an alert whenever products that meet the provided criteria become available on Amazon.

The feature detects not only new product launches but also cases when an out-of-stock item returns to the platform. According to Amazon, Interests can also help customers spot deals.

Under the hood, the feature uses large language models to enhance users’ product queries. If a shopper asks Interests to monitor for new smartphone launches, the LLMs might add in a list of top handset makers. This extra information helps Amazon’s search algorithms find more relevant results. 

“Interests is currently available to a small subset of U.S. customers in our U.S. app (iOS and Android) and mobile website, and we look forward to rolling it out to the rest of U.S. customers in the coming months,” Lloyd wrote in the blog post.

According to CNBC, Amazon started rolling out Interests alongside a second new AI feature called Health AI. It can answer health and wellness questions as well as recommend relevant products. Some responses reportedly include a badge that indicates the information they contain was “reviewed by US-based licensed clinicians.”

Health AI and Interests are rolling out less than two months after Amazon debuted Rufus, another machine learning tool for consumers. It’s a shopping assistant designed to help users browse the merchandise in the company’s e-commerce marketplace.

Rufus can answer product questions in a natural language format. The tool lends itself to, among other tasks, explaining the differences between similar items. Amazon says that Rufus generates answers based on information from product listings, shopper reviews and the broader web.

Earlier, the company launched a feature that generates a one-paragraph summary of the reviews below a product listing. It also displays keywords that highlight an item’s most important features. For merchants, Amazon offers an AI tool that can automatically generate a title and a description for new product listings.

Image: Amazon