Amazon AI summarizes products into audio snippets for shoppers

Amazon is bringing AI-generated audio product overviews to its shopping experience, allowing customers to listen to key features instead of just reading them. This feature represents Amazon’s continued push to enhance shopping with AI technologies, similar to its existing AI assistants and review summaries. The audio highlights aim to recreate the in-store experience of having a salesperson explain products, potentially addressing customer pain points around product research.

The big picture: Amazon has begun testing AI-powered audio summaries for select products through a new “Hear the highlights” button that lets customers listen to product features instead of reading them.

How it works: The feature uses large language models to generate audio overviews by analyzing product details, customer reviews, and web-scraped information.

• The audio summaries aim to make product research more engaging and help customers make purchasing decisions more efficiently.
• Initially, the feature focuses on products “that typically require consideration before purchase,” though Amazon hasn’t specified exact categories.

Current availability: The “Hear the Highlights” button is currently limited to select US customers and products, with planned expansion in coming months.

• Amazon indicates it will roll out the feature to more products and users over time as testing progresses.
• The company hasn’t shared specific metrics for measuring the feature’s success with customers.

The broader context: This audio feature joins Amazon’s growing arsenal of AI shopping tools designed to enhance the customer experience.

• The company already offers Rufus, an AI shopping assistant that answers product questions, and AI-generated summaries of user reviews.
• For sellers, Amazon provides AI tools to create product listings in bulk, streamlining the selling process.
• Similar AI-powered recap features exist on Amazon’s Prime Video and Kindle platforms, suggesting a company-wide strategy of using AI to summarize content.