Amazon launches AI-powered summaries of customer reviews

Amazon has a new feature that uses AI to create and display summaries of customer reviews on product pages, but you'll probably not see it right now.

Scrolling through scores of reviews is now unnecessary. (Image: Amazon)

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Amazon has introduced a new feature that uses artificial intelligence to create and display summaries of customer reviews on product pages. The feature aims to help shoppers quickly understand the overall feedback and key points about products before buying.

The feature is currently available to “a subset of mobile shoppers” in the US for a variety of products, and it may be expanded in the future, according to a post by Amazon on Monday.

The feature is part of Amazon’s efforts to build generative AI applications that improve and enhance their customers’ experience, as stated by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy earlier this month.

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The new feature works by providing a short paragraph that highlights the product features and customer sentiment frequently mentioned across written reviews, as well as pre-generated keywords for specific product attributes that customers can tap on to see more details, such as ease of use.

Also read | How to spot fake reviews on Amazon & Flipkart: A guide for smarter shopping

The summaries use only verified purchases from Amazon’s trusted review corpus, ensuring that customers can easily understand the community’s opinions at a glance, wrote Vaughn Schermerhorn, Amazon director of community shopping, in the post.

A previous report by CNBC gave us a first look at what the feature would be like. The report mentioned a children’s cauldron toy called “Magic Mixies,” where an AI-generated summary highlighted that while some of the toy’s customers liked it for its “fun factor, appearance, value, performance, quality, charging, and leakage,” a majority were of the opinion that $100 was too high for the toy. The summary also talked about issues customers experiences with the product’s quality and charging capabilities.

Amazon says that AI customer review summaries are based on customer feedback and that it may extend the feature to additional categories and customers in the coming months.