Hacker News Reader

Comment by geodel | Hacker News Reader

Thank you Amazon for standing up for everyman Rufus. We don't need AI agent from evil ad giants.

How do you know they are standing up for users? From where I'm sitting it looks like they just are trying to protect Alexa Shopping's revenue and/or monopoly.

I assume it was sarcasm, Rufus is an Amazon AI product.

And there go my Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure memories. George Carlin's Rufus was a "good 'un."

Ha. Amazon's in-app AI agent is called Rufus. It's incredibly annoying, and they love directing you to an 'Ask Rufus' page where you watch an AI agent not-quite-finish repeating your search terms back at you before you realize you're not actually on your search results page, and then spend some additional time trying to find the link to take you to said search results page.

I assume somewhere there's a team hitting their AI query KPI's due to this, but I really wish they'd shut off a few server racks and save everyone the annoyance instead.

There was internal JIRA ticket to rename Rufus -> Doofus as to dramatically improve performance and sentiment among shoppers on Amazon site.

We should see this improved version soon.

Amazon: famously not evil ad giant.

This is not them standing up for the small guy, this is them seeing their actual profit center in retail (advertisement and paid promotion) evaporating if human beings never view their listings.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com