Amazon launches new shopping-focused AI agent

Amazon has begun to invest more seriously in artificial intelligence. While it doesn’t seem like the company wants to dominate the segment, it has launched interesting products. Recently, the company announced Alexa Plus as an AI upgrade with conversational and “agentic” capabilities. Now, the company has announced Nova Act as a new shopping-focused AI model.

This isn’t the first time Amazon has announced AI-powered tools to assist users during the shopping experience. In early 2024, the company launched Rufus, although it seems to have gone unnoticed among customers. Then came the aforementioned Alexa Plus, free for Prime subscribers but costing $20/month for everyone else.

Amazon Nova Act, an AI model with advanced shopping capabilities

The new Nova Act isn’t just a tool but an entire AI model designed to help you make better purchasing decisions and automate tasks. In fact, Amazon claims that the model already powers some of Alexa Plus’s capabilities. Nova Act stands out for enabling “agent” AI features that expand possibilities and use cases.

Nova Act’s capabilities are similar to OpenAI’s Operator but focused on shopping. Nova Act-powered products can search the internet for you, make comparisons, make purchases or reservations, and answer questions about an image, among other things, all from a prompt. It is compatible with advanced or detailed instructions that add variations to the process. For instance, The Verge reports that you can instruct it to “not accept the insurance upsell” during purchases.

It’s worth noting that Nova Act is the first product from Amazon’s Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) Labs. Act is the sixth Nova model, a family announced by Amazon late last year. However, the other members in the lineup had different goals, such as “reasoning” and media generation (image and video).

Currently, Nova Act is not widely available. The model is only available to developers in a “research preview” so they can test its capabilities.

New website focused on Nova models; you can test them now

Amazon also announced an easier way to access its Nova models. The company has enabled a dedicated website where you can interact with them like a traditional chatbot. Previously, Nova models were only accessible through Amazon Bedrock. If you’re not aware, Bedrock is a platform that acts as a “hub” where developers can access several AI models from a single place.

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