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Dive Brief:
Amazon introduced Lens Live, an AI-powered shopping tool that scans products and shows matching items in a swipeable carousel inside the Amazon Shopping app, the company announced Tuesday.
Rufus, Amazon’s AI shopping assistant, is integrated into Lens Live. When customers use camera view, Rufus suggests questions and summaries of what makes a product stand out to help customer research products.
Lens Live is available for tens of millions of U.S. customers on the Amazon Shopping iOS app, and will roll out to more shoppers in the near future.
Dive Insight:
Lens Live is the e-commerce retailer’s latest discovery-focused feature, part of a strategy unveiled last year by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy to “reinvent” customer experience with generative AI.
The basic Lens feature, which will remain available alongside Lens Live, lets customers take a picture, upload an image or scan a barcode. Last October, Amazon added new visual search features including the ability to add text to an Amazon Lens image search for more precise results.
Lens Live is designed to detect the primary object in the camera view automatically, minimizing the need for customer interaction. The feature also adds the ability to focus the search on specific items by tapping them, add products directly to their cart and save selections to their wishlists within the camera view.
“We’ll continue to look for ways to build on the convenience of searching and shopping with Amazon Lens, helping customers find and shop for the items they need and want that much faster,” Amazon said in a blog post.
Amazon isn’t the only company exploring the possibilities of visual search. Google Lens can now tailor its search results to the store customers use it in, while eBay is applying the principles of visual search outside of the real world with virtual try-ons.
Pinterest made visual search a key element of its strategy earlier this year, and the company has “effectively become an AI-enabled shopping assistant,” CEO Bill Ready said during an earnings call last month.