Amazon has joined the ranks of firms offering generative video tools, although its release is aimed only at advertisers, at least for now. Simply called Video Generator, it can turn a product image into a video that showcases the product and even demonstrates its features, “leveraging Amazon’s unique insights to vividly bring a product story to life.” At the company’s Accelerate 2024 conference Amazon also debuted Live Image, which lets brands create animated GIFs from stills, a customizable chatbot assistant for third-party sellers, and a new AI-powered recommendation engine based on customer interests.

Live Image will be offered as part of Image Generator. Both tools are available in beta to select U.S. advertisers as Amazon continues to fine-tune them.

“We are hard at work delivering generative AI applications that empower advertisers to craft visually stunning, high-performing ads,” Amazon Ads VP Jay Richman said in a blog post, calling Video Generator “our first generative AI-powered technology designed to remove creative barriers and enable brands to produce lifestyle imagery that enhances ad performance.”

“Clips from Video Generator are 6-9 seconds in length at a 720p resolution (24 frames per second),” writes TechCrunch, explaining that “they’re automatically generated ‘around’ a seed product image — ‘inspired by the product and its details,’” taking “up to five minutes to create. “Users are presented with four variations from which to choose.”

Amazon says a recent study from Wyzowl revealed that “89 percent of consumers said they want to see more videos from brands in 2024, while businesses reported the lack of time and cost as the top barriers to video marketing.”

The new personalized product search and recommendation engine aims to help customers locate and discover items from the more than 300 million products the e-retailer offers.

“The feature will also curate more relevant product descriptions around user interests,” writes The Verge, noting that “terms like ‘gluten-free’ will appear more prominently in the descriptions of relevant products for customers who regularly search for gluten-free items, for example.”

“Amazon has been rolling out various AI tools amid intensifying competition with Microsoft Corp., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and OpenAI,” writes Bloomberg, noting “one is a workplace chatbot called Amazon Q that helps corporate customers search for information, write code and review business metrics. Rufus lets consumers comparison shop and research products on Amazon’s web store.”