Customer ratings and reviews are a staple of online shopping and have been a part of Amazon since its launch. Now, the online retail giant is using AI to make it easier for customers to navigate product reviews with AI-generated customer review highlights.
“Customer reviews are one of the oldest and most important features on Amazon. When we first launched reviews in 1995, the idea was radical,” writes Vaughn Schermerhorn, Director of Community Shopping at Amazon, in a recent post.
The new AI-generated customer review highlights offer users a succinct paragraph that details the pros and cons frequently mentioned in customer reviews. The AI review highlights paragraph for a product is displayed on its product detail page. Amazon’s AI-generated customer review highlights are currently available to some Amazon users in the US via the Amazon mobile app.
For example, the AI-generated review highlights paragraph for the PlayStation 5 states, “Customers like the quality, smoothness, and graphics of the video game console. For example, they mention it works great, loads into games and matches quicker, and has a more responsive feel.”
Find reviews mentioning specific aspects
Users can also select key terms to find reviews that mention the term easily. For instance, clicking Graphics under the review highlights for the PS5 will show the user an AI-generated paragraph summing up how customers feel about the console’s graphics, with the reviews mentioning graphics listed below. Over the coming months, Amazon plans to expand its review highlights to additional categories and open the feature to more customers.
“We want to make it even easier for customers to understand the common themes across reviews, and with the recent advancements in generative AI, we believe we have the technical means to address this long-standing customer need,” Schermerhorn adds.
Amazon promises to continue to improve the review experience and help customers locate the reviews that will be most helpful to them. The online retailer also trains machine learning models to analyse and detect fake reviews and unusual behaviour. Only trusted reviews from verified purchases are used to generate Amazon’s AI-generated customer review highlights.
Jack Brassell is a freelance journalist and aspiring novelist. Jack is a self-proclaimed nerd with a lifelong passion for storytelling. As an author, Jack writes mostly horror and young adult fantasy. Also an avid gamer, she works as the lead news editor at Hardcore Droid. When she isn't writing or playing games, she can often be found binge-watching Parks & Rec or The Office, proudly considering herself to be a cross between Leslie Knope and Pam Beasley.
