Amazon.com Inc. today introduced a generative artificial intelligence feature that will help online shoppers more easily decide whether a product is worth buying.

On Amazon’s e-commerce marketplace, many product listings feature user-submitted reviews. The company’s new generative AI feature can analyze the reviews below a product listing and automatically create a summary. That summary consists of a single AI-generated paragraph.

According to Amazon, the new feature can provide high-level information about a product such as whether customers generally find it easy to use. The AI is also capable of pointing out more specific product details. An AI-generated review summary could, for example, highlight that many buyers have a positive view of a smartwatch’s preinstalled app catalog.

Located immediately below each AI-generated review summary is a collection of clickable keywords. If many customers write that a product is user-friendly, Amazon might display a tag that reads “Ease of Use.” Clicking that tag would bring up another AI-generated summary detailing why customers consider the product easy to use.

Amazon says it generates summaries from trusted customer reviews. In particular, the company’s new AI tool only takes into account feedback submitted by users who have purchased the product they’re reviewing. Additionally, it uses fraud detection algorithms to automatically detect fake feedback.

The company’s algorithms “analyze thousands of data points to detect risk, including relations to other accounts, sign-in activity, review history, and other indications of unusual behavior,” Vaughn Schermerhorn, the director of community shopping at Amazon, wrote in a blog post. Schermerhorn added that Amazon also has a team dedicated to preventing fake reviews from appearing below product listings. 

Amazon first added support for online reviews in 1995, a few months after its namesake e-commerce marketplace launched. Last year, more than 124 million Amazon customers wrote nearly 1.5 billion reviews about the products on the marketplace. That works out to 45 feedback submissions per second.

The new generative AI review summary feature is currently available via its mobile app to a limited number of users in the U.S. “We are always testing, learning, and fine-tuning our AI models to improve the customer experience and, based on customer feedback, may expand our review highlights feature to additional categories and customers in the coming months,” Schermerhorn wrote.

Amazon reportedly plans to roll out more generative AI features for its e-commerce marketplace down the road. In May, Bloomberg reported that the company is working on a “ChatGPT-style” product search tool. It’s believed the tool will enable users to not only search for merchandise but also compare items and access personalized buying suggestions. 

Photo: Amazon