Amazon has become the latest tech giant to announce a chatbot powered by artificial intelligence (AI).

It said that the bot, called Q, would help businesses to do things like summarise long documents or group chats and would increase productivity.

It comes a year after OpenAI’s bot ChatGPT shook the market, sparking a rush among tech firms to adopt them.

Amazon also said it would protect companies from copyright issues arising from the use of its bot.

It follows high-profile lawsuits brought against ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, over claims that firms’ copyright was infringed to train the system.

Amazon will hope that Q, which will gradually be rolled out across it main business applications, will entice more companies to use its cloud computing services.

The bot can also answer customer queries, generate charts, analyse data and help businesses with their coding needs.

The race between tech giants to innovate in AI has been heating up, with Microsoft considered to be leading the field after its big investment in ChatGPT.

In September, Amazon said it would invest “up to $4bn [£3.2bn]” in Anthropic, an AI firm set up by ex-OpenAI staff members. It also owns Mechanical Turk, a service which crowdsources training of AI models.

Copyright fears

As it launches Q, the company promised to protect businesses from copyright claims, such as the lawsuit brought by comedian Sarah Silverman against OpenAI and Facebook-owner Meta in July.

Ms Silverman, along with two other authors, claimed their books had been “ingested and used to train ChatGPT”, and that Meta’s Llama AI system was also using their work.

In November, a judge in the US dismissed much of Silverman’s lawsuit.

However, other authors including Margaret Atwood and Philip Pullman have also called on AI companies to compensate them for using their work.