Amazon is redefining impulse buying with its newest feature, Lens Live, an AI-enhanced upgrade to its visual search tool. Now available for tens of millions of U.S. iOS users, Lens Live turns your camera into a real-time shopping portal.

Here’s how it works:

• Instant Object Recognition
  Just open the Amazon Shopping app, point your camera at an object, and Lens Live will instantly detect it. A swipeable carousel of related items from Amazon’s catalog appears at the bottom of your screen.
• Swipe, Tap, Shop
  You can tap any item in the carousel to focus on it, add it directly to your cart, or save it to your wishlist without leaving the camera view.
• Rufus, the AI Shopping Assistant
  Integrated into Lens Live is Rufus, Amazon’s AI assistant. Beneath the carousel, Rufus offers product highlights, poses smart questions, and presents quick summaries to help you research efficiently, all while you’re still in the camera mode.
• Powered by AWS Intelligence
  Lens Live runs on Amazon’s AWS stack, including SageMaker and OpenSearch, and uses on-device machine learning to detect real-world objects and match them against billions of items in Amazon’s inventory.
• Gradual Rollout
  The feature is rolling out to U.S. users on iOS over the coming weeks, while traditional Lens options, like uploading images or scanning barcodes, remain available.

Lens Live makes shopping frictionless by fusing discovery and purchase. It reduces the steps from noticing an item in the real world to owning it. Combining AI with visual search not only gives Amazon an edge over rivals like Google Lens or Pinterest Lens, but also boosts chances for impulse buys.

With this, Amazon continues its push to weave generative AI through the shopping experience, creating a seamless blend of browsing and buying.