Amazon’s Latest AI Tool Will Summarize Customer Reviews For You

James Martin/CNET

The next time you’re shopping on Amazon, it might be a little easier to surf reviews. On Monday, Amazon unveiled a new feature that will use generative AI to highlight common themes across customer reviews and summarize them for shoppers.

The AI will not write new customer reviews — rather, it will read existing ones, analyze them to find common themes and summarize them for people shopping for that product.

When shoppers click on a product that has this feature enabled, you will see the summary on the product feature page. You can then explore the tabs of specific product attributes, like “Ease of use” or “Performance,” to bring up specific customer reviews that mention those topics.

Amazon said the AI-powered feature will primarily gather information from reviews with verified purchases.

“The new AI-generated review highlights use only our trusted review corpus from verified purchases, ensuring that customers can easily understand the community’s opinions at a glance,” wrote Vaughn Schermerhorn, director of community shopping at Amazon.

As of now, the feature is available only to some US mobile shoppers.

Amazon and AI

This feature is one part of Amazon’s AI push. Earlier this year, the company’s cloud computing arm, Amazon Web Services, began offering AI-powered tools for companies and developers.

Amazon, like nearly every tech company this past year, has expanded its use of generative AI. Artificial intelligence technologies have been around for years, but the field has advanced rapidly. AI-powered tools and services have begun to seep into everyday life, impacting everything from job hunting to fitness and education. 

While such tools have the potential to help people on tasks big and small, more advanced systems have sparked concerns about their impact on society. Seven of the biggest tech companies, including Amazon, met with President Joe Biden last month to discuss how to prioritize security, safety and trust in the development of AI.

Editors’ note: CNET is using an AI engine to help create some stories. For more, see this post.