According to the financial app, Zhixun, the US technology giant Amazon (AMZN.US) announced on Thursday that the company is actively launching a generative AI assistant called Amelia. The goal is to quickly answer various questions for independent sellers on the Amazon e-commerce platform and provide professional advice and tools to improve their operational efficiency and sales.

Amazon's new AI assistant is currently in internal testing and is only available to some Amazon partners in the US market. It will allow sellers to ask questions in English and receive professional guidance on how to effectively manage their business and quickly resolve seller queries.

Mary Beth Westmorland, Vice President of Global Sales Partnerships at Amazon, said in a statement: 'Project Amelia is a professional AI partner available to sellers at any time. It understands the unique business of users, providing personalized insights and technical support at any page of the Seller Center.'

Amazon stated that it has built Amelia using the company's AI application development and computing power hosting platform Amazon Bedrock. The platform provides access to the basic models of Amazon AWS and other large language model providers. Developers can use various AI tools to build and train large models, and expand AI applications. The company mentioned that through the training and fine-tuning techniques of this AI platform, Amelia deeply integrates profound expertise in Amazon sales and e-commerce, giving it a unique ability to meet the needs of Amazon platform sellers.

By providing unified API access to different large models, combined with the computing power cloud platform based on NVIDIA GPU and AWS's self-developed AI accelerator, Amazon Bedrock not only lowers the technical threshold for enterprises or individuals to develop and deploy AI software, but also enables AI software developers to use different basic models flexibly and easily upgrade to the latest version of large models. The specific uses of large model-based generative AI include various applications from text generation to image and video generation.

The Amazon Seller Central is a web-based dashboard used by independent Amazon merchants to manage their online business stores. It serves as a central hub for them to list and price products, create, update, and set product information, manage inventory, fulfill orders, track performance, and create promotions.

According to internal test results, Amazon sellers can use Amelia to ask questions like 'What is the most important thing I need to prepare for the holiday shopping season?' The AI assistant will provide personalized information on the best practices related to product inventory and past customer sales indicators for specific merchants. This allows Amazon sellers to be prepared for the growing interest in their product lines, or to choose the most popular product categories from previous shopping seasons and determine which unique promotional methods are best suited to put them in front of the majority of shoppers.

According to the test results, users can also ask Amelia for current sales data and website traffic information to understand how their business is doing. This will provide a summary report of sales, units sold, and website traffic in an easy-to-read format. In addition, Amazon sellers can continue to ask follow-up questions to gain deeper insights into the sales and traffic information for specific categories or products.

Amazon states that artificial intelligence will soon be able to provide solutions to various complex issues within the e-commerce system, such as logistics or reporting problems. For example, sellers can tell the AI, 'I have 500 units of goods in transit, but it is not reflected in the system. Can I ask a professional data services personnel to investigate?'

Then, the AI assistant will help guide sellers in resolving their concerns through appropriate remedial channels, including connecting them with the professional technical support team. Amazon expects that in the near future, Amelia will be able to solve certain extremely complex problems on behalf of sellers.

'By simplifying sellers' business operation requirements and inventory management burdens, Project Amelia can significantly reduce the time and effort required for sellers to manage their business, allowing them to reinvest this time and effort into updating their product channels and exploring new performance growth models,' said Westmoreland.

Amazon's generative AI landscape continues to expand.

Since 2023, Amazon's expansion in the field of generative AI has been continuously accelerating. It is reported that Amelia is currently being tested by a group of Amazon sellers in the United States and will gradually be rolled out to a larger range of US sellers in the coming weeks. In addition, this AI assistant based on the e-commerce platform will begin phased expansion to other countries later this year and will gradually provide many languages other than English.

It is understood that prior to the release of the heavyweight news from the ai assistant Amelia, Amazon has continuously escalated its layout in the field of generative AI. Previously, media reports citing insiders revealed that Amazon's AI voice assistant "Alexa", after a major transformation, will be driven by a core model named Claude provided by Anthropic. Insiders stated that Amazon plans to charge $5 to $10 per month for its new "enhanced version" of Alexa voice assistant, which is expected to be released in October.

Amazon Alexa has long been mainly accessed through Amazon TV and Echo speakers and other Amazon terminal devices, mainly used for setting timers, quickly checking the weather, playing music, or answering simple questions. The paid version of Alexa will be able to engage in ChatGPT-style efficient dialogues with users, built on complex questions and answers. The new version of Alexa aims to enable users to seek richer shopping advice, such as what clothes to buy for vacation and gather more news stories. It is also designed to meet users' complex demands, such as ordering food online through a prompt or helping users draft emails, assisting users in efficiently processing work documents.

Amazon previously introduced Amazon Q, an AI chat assistant focused on the AWS platform for cloud computing services, but Amazon Q focuses on quickly accessing various major functional modules of AWS cloud services rather than a general AI chatbot like ChatGPT. Amazon Q is a fully integrated productivity assistant launched by Amazon AWS, designed for developers on the AWS platform. Amazon Q provides access and scheduling management capabilities to data, code, and infrastructure on the AWS platform and its connected systems through a chatbot interface. Amazon Q can help enterprise customers quickly obtain relevant answers to urgent issues, solve problems, generate content, and quickly respond to queries from enterprise customers using data, code, and professional knowledge in enterprise information repositories, relevant codes, and enterprise systems.

For Amazon, keeping pace with competitors in the field of generative AI is crucial because AI chatbots launched by Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, such as ChatGPT developed by OpenAI, and Google's Gemini, have garnered greater user attention on a larger scale. These AI chatbots can almost instantly provide complete responses to complex prompts or queries. Microsoft, on the other hand, relies on its major shareholder status in OpenAI to embed the GPT-4 AI large model that OpenAI prides itself on into flagship applications such as the Office suite and multiple flagship application software on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, becoming a leader in AI application endpoints globally, with performance and stock prices continuously growing since 2023.