Amazon has begun testing a new feature that allows shoppers to hear quick, AI-generated audio summaries of product, designed to make the shopping experience easier, faster, and more engaging.
The new “Hear the highlights” feature provides short-form audio content on select product detail pages within the Amazon Shopping app.
Powered by large language models (LLMs), these audio clips summarise key product features by drawing from Amazon’s catalog, customer reviews, and other online sources.
The result is a conversational-style breakdown of a product’s most important selling points—ideal for busy shoppers who want information on the go.
How It Works
To access the feature:
-
Open the Amazon Shopping app and visit a product detail page.
-
If available, tap the “Hear the highlights” button located beneath the product image.
-
Press play to listen to a short, spoken summary of the product’s top features.
The experience mimics a helpful conversation with a well-informed friend, bringing product research to life in a more natural and accessible format.
Currently, Amazon is testing the feature with a subset of US customers and plans to expand availability across more product categories in the coming months.
Initial summaries are available for items that typically require more consideration before purchase, such as home appliances, personal care products, and electronics.
Examples include the Ninja Blender, OSEA Undaria Algae Body Oil, and SHOKZ OpenRun Pro headphones.
The Technology Behind It
The audio summaries are generated by Amazon’s in-house AI systems, which create scripts based on a blend of product data and real customer feedback.
These scripts are then converted into spoken summaries using short-form audio technology.
This innovation builds on Amazon’s broader strategy to enhance shopping with generative AI. Other recent AI-powered features include:
-
Rufus: A conversational shopping assistant that answers product-related questions in real time.
-
Shopping Guides: AI-generated recommendation hubs for over 100 product types.
-
Review Highlights: Summarised themes from customer reviews to help assess product sentiment quickly.
-
Interests: A personalised feed that monitors and surfaces new products based on your passions.
-
Buy for Me: A beta feature using agentic AI to complete purchases from third-party websites when Amazon doesn’t carry the item directly.
Amazon says these innovations are part of its ongoing mission to make shopping more intuitive, informative, and fun.
As AI continues to reshape the e-commerce landscape, Amazon is betting that features like audio summaries can help modern consumers make quicker, more confident purchasing decisions, even when their hands are full.
Click here to sign up to Retail Gazette‘s free daily email newsletter
