Amazon launches Lens Live, an AI-powered shopping tool for use in the real world

Amazon is further investing in AI-powered shopping experiences with Tuesday’s launch of Lens Live, a new AI-powered upgrade to its Amazon Lens shopping feature that allows consumers to discover new products through visual search, similar to competitors like Google Lens and Pinterest Lens. The tool will also integrate with Amazon’s AI shopping assistant, Rufus, for product insights, the retailer notes.

Lens Live will not replace Amazon’s existing visual search tool, Amazon Lens, which lets you take a picture, upload an image, or scan a barcode to discover products. Instead, it brings a real-time component to Amazon Lens so you can point your phone at things you’re seeing in the real world to see matching products in a swipeable carousel at the bottom of the screen.

The addition is one of several ways Amazon has been leveraging AI to help online shoppers. Over the past year or so, the company has also rolled out other features like its AI assistant Rufus, AI-powered shopping guides, AI-enhanced product reviews, AI tools for finding clothes that fit, AI audio product summaries, personalized shopping prompts, as well as tools for merchants.

Lens Live also capitalizes on activities customers are already doing: comparison shopping while in retail stores out in the real world to see if Amazon has a better deal on the same or similar item.

When using the new Lens Live feature, customers can tap on any item in their camera view to trigger the feature to focus on that product. If they find a match they like, they can add it to their shopping cart by tapping the (+) plus icon or tap the heart icon to save it to their wish list.

The feature is powered by Amazon SageMaker services, which allow machine learning models to be deployed at scale. It runs on AWS-managed Amazon OpenSearch.

In addition, Amazon’s AI-powered shopping assistant Rufus is available in the new experience, allowing customers to see AI-generated product summaries and suggested questions of conversational prompts they can ask to learn more about the item. According to Amazon, this lets shoppers do some quick product research and view product insights before making a purchase.

The Lens Live feature is first launching on the Amazon Shopping app on iOS, initially for “tens of millions” of U.S. shoppers before rolling out to others in the U.S. The company didn’t say whether it’s going to expand to other global markets.