Amazon just launched Lens Live, an upgrade to its visual shopping tool, Amazon Lens. The new feature adds real-time product discovery through your phone’s camera.
You point your phone at an item in the real world. Lens Live then shows matching products in a swipeable carousel at the bottom of the screen. You can tap any item to add it to your cart or save it to your wishlist.
Lens Live isn’t replacing Amazon Lens. It builds on it by adding a live view instead of just uploading images or scanning barcodes. 
The feature works alongside Amazon’s AI shopping assistant, Rufus, which offers AI-generated product summaries and suggested questions to help shoppers research items quickly before buying.
“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.”
Lens Live runs on Amazon SageMaker and AWS-managed Amazon OpenSearch to power its AI behind the scenes.
Amazon sees Lens Live as a way to tap into comparison shopping behavior, letting users check prices on the spot to see if Amazon offers a better deal.
The launch kicks off on the Amazon Shopping app for iOS. It will initially roll out to “tens of millions” of U.S. shoppers, with no announced timeline for other countries.
“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.”
