Amazon is using AI to help customers spot scam messages
What's the story
Amazon is leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to help customers identify whether a message they received from the company is genuine or a scam. The feature, available on Alexa for Shopping, analyzes messages against billions of others sent by Amazon worldwide. It looks at sender information, content, timing, and metadata to confirm authenticity.
Learning system
AI tool will learn and improve over time
The new AI tool is designed to learn and improve over time as more customers report suspicious messages. This will help Amazon's system detect scams more accurately in the future.
The company has already been working on tackling the issue of impersonation scams with a similar feature that lets users forward suspicious messages to verify@amazon.com for authenticity checks.
Scam prevention
Amazon's broader strategy to tackle scams
The new AI feature is part of Amazon's broader strategy to tackle the growing problem of scams.
These include fake order confirmations, Prime membership renewal alerts, account suspension warnings, package delivery notifications, and job scams.
Earlier this year, Amazon had also launched an email address (verify@amazon.com) for customers to forward suspicious messages and get confirmation if they were real or not.
Enhanced functionality
Shift in product strategy around Alexa
The introduction of this feature is part of Amazon's shift in product strategy around Alexa, focusing more on shopping-related queries and proactive assistance.
The assistant can now find personalized deals, create shopping guides, help customers reorder everyday items, give AI product overviews, transcribe handwritten shopping lists, and more.
It also recently added an "Update Me When" feature to help track new product releases.