Amazon is using AI to make it easier to see if a product is good. the company is now rolling AI-generated review summaries, which boils down hundreds or thousands of Amazon reviews into a one-paragraph summary that explains what most people like or don’t like about a product.
Summaries have been in testing for at least a couple of months and are now more available to a “subset” of users in the US on the Amazon mobile app. Amazon says they’re available “on a wide selection of products.” So far, we’ve seen them on TVs, headphones, tablets, and fitness trackers. But the availability of the feature is not completely consistent. The Galaxy Tab A7 has a review summary, but the new Galaxy Tab A8 does not.
Amazon’s summaries are easy to read, but include some occasional language quirks. They also seem to focus primarily on the positive aspects of the product, spending less time on the negative aspects and leaving them for last. That said, that could be because Amazon search already pulls up highly-rated products, so it’s hard to find roundups of something that has particularly frustrated people. Here are a couple of example screenshots.
The feature can be found at the top of the review section on mobile under the “Customers Say” heading. At the end, the paragraph includes a note that it was generated by AI. Amazon says the reviews are only based on verified purchases in an effort to reduce fake reviews. The system also includes featured review filters that you can tap to find the actual reviews that touch on those features or issues.
Summarizing customer feedback has turned out to be one of the most obvious and easy-to-implement uses of generative AI. Newegg launched a similar feature last week, and Microsoft added AI roundups to the Microsoft Store in May. As more platforms implement this, the big question for users will be how much they can trust summaries from a service that is clearly trying to sell them something.
