Amazon wants to make it more convenient for you to spend money on its online shopping platform, making it as easy as pointing your phone’s camera at any object around you and finding it listed online. You can even ask the onboard AI details about the product, so that you can make an informed decision before hitting the order button.
What’s new for Amazon shopping?
The new Amazon tool is called Lens Live, which builds atop the foundations of Amazon Lens. The big difference is the generative AI chops at the heart of this tool, which is now better equipped at detecting objects and matching them against a database of items currently on sale via Amazon.
“When customers with Lens Live open Amazon Lens, the Lens camera will instantly begin scanning products and show top matching items in a swipeable carousel at the bottom of the screen, allowing for quick comparisons,” says Amazon.
The company is rolling out the new tool to millions of users in the US, starting with the iOS app, and plans to expand its availability in the months to follow. All you have to do is open the Amazon app, tap on the camera icon in the search bar at the top, and launch the camera scanner view.
How it works?
Lens Live comes with enhanced object recognition chops, so that when users open the camera view and tap on an object, its outline is automatically detected and it is subsequently scanned against Amazon’s inventory of identical or similar items.
As soon as a match is found, the product listing card appears in the bottom half of the screen. If there are multiple matches, you can scroll past the card carousel and pick the one that you like. These cards also feature a “+” button so that you can directly add those items to the shopping cart.
Additionally, you can ask the Rufus AI shopping assistant to describe the product’s core details in brief and clarify any doubts. In fact, the whole conversational experience is powered by the in-house Rufus LLM and takes an approach similar to that of Apple’s Visual Intelligence and Google’s Gemini Live with screen sharing.
