Amazon’s Lens Live turns your phone camera’s wandering eye into an AI shopping tool

Amazon has launched Lens Live, a new AI-powered shopping feature that lets users point their camera at objects in their environment to find matching products on Amazon’s marketplace. The feature represents Amazon’s latest push to integrate AI into the shopping experience, potentially transforming how consumers discover and purchase products by making any visible object a potential shopping trigger.

What you should know: Lens Live uses real-time object detection to identify products captured by your camera and surfaces similar items from Amazon’s billions of product listings.

• The feature is currently rolling out exclusively to the Amazon Shopping app on iOS, with broader availability planned for the “coming weeks.”
• Users can either pan their camera around a room or focus on specific products to trigger the AI-powered product matching.
• Once similar items are identified, they appear in a swipeable carousel with options to add products directly to your cart or wishlist.

How it works: The feature builds on Amazon’s existing visual search capabilities while adding real-time AI analysis and integration with Amazon’s Rufus assistant.

• An object detection model analyzes items shown on your camera in real-time, comparing them against Amazon’s vast product database.
• Lens Live integrates with Rufus, Amazon’s AI assistant, to summarize product descriptions and answer questions about identified items.
• The technology extends Amazon’s current visual search tools, which already allow users to search by uploading images, scanning barcodes, or taking photos.

The big picture: Amazon’s approach mirrors Google’s Gemini Live AI assistant, which similarly scans environments and answers questions about objects, but with a crucial difference—Amazon’s tool prioritizes commerce over information.

• While Google’s tool focuses on providing information and answering questions, Amazon’s implementation puts purchasing front and center with prominent “buy” buttons.
• This represents Amazon’s strategy of leveraging AI to reduce friction in the shopping process by eliminating the need to manually search for products users can see.