Reading Is Such a Drag. Let Amazon’s AI Give You Audio Summaries of Products
May 22, 2025
Imagine opening an Amazon product page and, instead of just reading, you hear a salesperson walk you through the product’s features as if you were in a physical store. This conversational experience appears to be what Amazon is going for next.
In a blog post on Tuesday, Amazon announced that it’s testing AI-powered short audio overviews for select items on its marketplace.
Customers can tap the new “Hear the highlights” button on a product’s details page to have Amazon’s AI shopping experts explain its standout features. Rajiv Mehta, Amazon’s VP for search and conversational shopping, says the goal is to make product research fun for customers and help them make a purchasing decision.
To generate these audio overviews, Amazon uses large language models (LLMs) that draw information from product details, customer reviews, and other data scraped from the web. Initially, the feature will be limited to products that “typically require consideration before purchase,” Mehta adds, without specifying the categories.
The “Hear the Highlights” button is currently available to a limited group of US customers on select product pages, with plans to expand it to more products and users in the coming months.
A lot of products on Amazon already include vendor-produced videos alongside product shots, though they’re not exactly award-caliber productions. We’ll have to see if the company’s AI can come up with something more natural.
Amazon has been busy infusing AI into the shopping experience. Its app features Rufus, an AI-powered assistant who can answer questions about a product. There’s also a feature that provides a summary of user reviews. Sellers, meanwhile, can bulk-create AI product listings.
Similarly, AI-powered recaps on Prime Video and Kindle are intended to help you recall what happened earlier on a show or a book, respectively.
At its I/O developer conference this week, Google unveiled an AI-powered shopping assistant that puts its agentic AI to work by finding the cheapest price for that shirt, purse, or pair of sports tickets, and then taking you through the checkout process.
Everything You Missed at Google I/O 2025
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