Amazon is rolling out Alexa for Shopping, its AI shopping assistant, to all Canadian customers over the coming week, the company announced Thursday. It’s free in the Amazon Shopping app and on Amazon.ca when you’re signed in. You don’t need Prime, an Echo or the Alexa app.

The headline is the AI assistant, but the most useful part, two weeks before Black Friday, is a plain chart: price history.

How to check whether a deal is real

  1. Update the Amazon Shopping app.
  2. Open any product page and tap Price History, or tap the Alexa icon in the bottom bar and ask for the item’s price history. On desktop, the assistant sits at the top of the screen.
  3. Switch between 30, 60 and 365 days. If the “sale” price matches what the item sold for most of the year, it isn’t much of a sale.

Amazon says price history covers “hundreds of millions of products.” A price alert feature, which notifies you when an item drops to a price you set, is coming in the “coming weeks and months,” so it may not arrive before Black Friday.

What else it does

  • AI overviews at the top of search results and on product pages, summarizing a category and what to look for.
  • Shopping guides for big purchases like TVs that compare features, prices and reviews from Amazon and the web.
  • Cart building: search past orders or say “add my regular dog treats” to fill a cart.

The catch: it remembers

Alexa for Shopping is built to remember you. Amazon says your conversations with Alexa on an Echo inform your shopping on Amazon.ca, and your Amazon browsing and purchases inform Alexa, in both directions. Its own example: brainstorm a science fair project with your Echo, then ask the app the next day for “supplies for my science fair project that we talked about.” It also stores details like family members, pets, interests and dietary needs. You can view, update and delete what it knows by asking it.

Why it’s worth your time: The price history chart is a genuinely useful check against inflated “was” prices during Black Friday. The assistant is optional. If you’d rather Amazon didn’t connect your Echo conversations to your shopping, ask it what it knows about you and remove what you don’t want stored.