Amazon is giving your camera an AI-powered shopping cart

(Image credit: Amazon)

Amazon's new Lens Live feature lets users point their phone camera at objects and immediately buy similar products
The AI tool produces a carousel of potential purchases
Lens Live is integrated with the Rufus AI assistant to provide quick information and answers about the products

You no longer need to know what something’s called to buy it on Amazon, thanks to the company's new AI-powered Lens Live feature.

All you need to do is point your smartphone camera at anything that grabs your eye, from a stranger's shoes to a fancy backpack for dogs, and tap the screen. The AI will immediately offer a range of similar products for you to add to your cart, complete with prices and reviews.

It’s a combination of visual search and assisted shopping sans typing. You have the immediate option to make a purchase by tapping on the plus icon or save it for later with a tap on the heart. Lens Live builds on but isn't replacing the existing visual search tool, Amazon Lens, but it does make impulse buying easier. And if you want to know more about what you’re seeing, it's also linked to Amazon’s AI shopping assistant Rufus. The AI assistant can answer follow-up questions and tell you more about the product and how other customers feel about their purchase.

It's a lot like Google Lens or Pinterest's own camera tools. But, while Google Lens can identify objects, animals, landmarks, and flowers, and Pinterest’s camera can spot a style or aesthetic, Amazon is all about making it possibly too easy to get straight to making a purchase.

People already comparison shop all of the time, deciding if the object catching their eye in a store can be found cheaper online, or if the one they see in an online ad can be obtained faster with an in-store purchase. Lens Live simply speeds things up by skipping the need to type a brand name or describe an item, instead allowing you to point your camera.

AI e-commerce

Lens Live is only rolling out to iOS devices right now, with no Android release date announced. Lens Live fits with Amazon's work to make AI part of its entire company setup. Amazon has rolled out AI-generated review summaries, personalized product prompts, AI-powered clothing fit tools, and more. Lens Live is simply a more direct way to use AI to help people make purchases.

Depending on how people feel about the tool, it could fundamentally reshape shopping. AI visual shopping might have a more subtle impact on people by making the entire world theoretically a catalog of purchases, with Amazon as the checkout counter. Every object becomes a possible purchase, and your camera redirects your buying impulse in seconds. Of course, that's a nightmare if you’re already someone who struggles with self-control on Amazon.

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Eric Hal Schwartz is a freelance writer for TechRadar with more than 15 years of experience covering the intersection of the world and technology. For the last five years, he served as head writer for Voicebot.ai and was on the leading edge of reporting on generative AI and large language models. He's since become an expert on the products of generative AI models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google Gemini, and every other synthetic media tool. His experience runs the gamut of media, including print, digital, broadcast, and live events. Now, he's continuing to tell the stories people want and need to hear about the rapidly evolving AI space and its impact on their lives. Eric is based in New York City.

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