Shopping on Amazon just got a lot more conversational. The company has launched Join the chat, a new interactive feature inside its existing Hear the highlights experience.
If you have not come across Hear the highlights before, it is an AI-powered audio summary tool that lives on millions of product pages inside the Amazon Shopping app. It gives you a short audio rundown of a product’s key features, pulled from product details, customer reviews, and other publicly available information.
Now, the ‘Join the chat’ feature takes it one step further by letting you have a conversation with the AI.
How does Amazon’s Join the chat feature work?
Once you tap play on the Hear the highlights button below a product image, you can tap the raised-hand icon to expand into full-screen view and either type or speak your question. The AI hosts can pause, answer your question in real time, and then pick up right where they left off.
You can also minimize the player and keep listening while you browse. The AI does not give generic answers either. It tracks what has already been covered in the audio summary and responds with new, relevant information each time.
So if you ask whether a coffee maker suits a beginner or someone with barista experience, or whether a sweater feels itchy based on reviews, you get a tailored, context-aware answer rather than a canned response.
Amazon describes it as the kind of conversation you would have with a knowledgeable store employee. Join the chat is now live on iOS and Android in the US.
What else has Amazon been up to lately?
Amazon recently launched a dedicated storefront for AI-powered gadgets, giving AI-enhanced devices their own curated corner of the marketplace. And for Kindle fans, Amazon also fixed one of the most complained-about issues with the Kindle Colorsoft, addressing the screen experience that made reading after dark more of a chore than it needed to be.