Amazon Upgrades Shopping With Real Time AI Lens

Amazon Unveils Real-Time AI Shopping with Lens Live

Amazon is significantly advancing its AI-powered shopping capabilities with the introduction of Lens Live. Announced on Tuesday, this new feature is an upgrade to its existing Amazon Lens tool, which allows users to find products through visual search. This move positions Amazon to compete more directly with similar visual search technologies from rivals like Google Lens and Pinterest Lens.

How Lens Live Enhances Visual Search

Unlike the original Amazon Lens, which requires you to take a photo or upload an image, Lens Live introduces a real-time element. Users can now simply point their phone's camera at objects in their environment. As they do, a swipeable carousel of matching or similar products from Amazon's catalog appears at the bottom of the screen, offering an immediate and interactive discovery experience.

Seamless Shopping and In-Store Comparison

Lens Live is designed to make shopping more fluid, especially for consumers who are already out in physical retail stores. It streamlines the process of comparison shopping, allowing users to quickly check if Amazon offers a better price on an item they see on a shelf. When a user spots an item in their camera view, they can tap on it to focus the search. If they find a product they like, they can instantly add it to their shopping cart with a tap of the plus icon or save it for later by tapping the heart icon.

A Deeper Dive into Amazon's AI Ecosystem

This launch is the latest in a series of AI-driven enhancements from the retail giant. Lens Live will be integrated with Rufus, Amazon's AI shopping assistant, providing AI-generated product summaries and suggesting questions to help customers research items before buying.

This is part of a broader strategy that includes other recent innovations like AI-powered shopping guides, AI-summarized product reviews, and even AI tools to help find clothes that fit. The technology behind Lens Live is powered by scalable Amazon SageMaker services and runs on AWS-managed Amazon OpenSearch.

Availability and Rollout

The Lens Live feature is beginning its rollout on the Amazon Shopping app for iOS. It will initially be available to tens of millions of shoppers in the U.S., with a wider U.S. release planned. Amazon has not yet announced plans for a global expansion of the feature.