Jacob Kastrenakesa deputy editor who oversees tech and news coverage. Since joining The Verge in 2012, he’s published 5,000+ stories and is the founding editor of the creators desk.Amazon is using AI to make it easier to see if a product is any good. The company is nowAI-generated review summaries, which boil down hundreds or thousands of Amazon reviews into a one-paragraph blurb explaining what most people like or dislike about a product.
The summaries have been in testing for at least a couple of months, and they’re now more widely available to a “subset” of users in the US on Amazon’s mobile app. Amazon says they’re available “across a broad selection of products.” So far, we’ve seen them on TVs, headphones, tablets, and fitness trackers. But the feature’s availability isn’t completely consistent. The Galaxy Tab A7 has a review summary, but the newer Galaxy Tab A8 does not.
Amazon’s summaries are easy to read but do include some occasional language quirks. They also seem to focus primarily on the positives of the product, spending less time on the negatives and leaving them for the end. That said, that could be because Amazon’s search already elevates highly rated products, so it’s hard to find summaries of anything that people have been particularly frustrated by. Here are a couple screenshots of examples.
Summarizing customer reviews has turned out to be one of the more obvious and easy to implement uses of generative AI. Newegg