Amazon has announced the debut of Lens Live, a new visual search feature intended to make product discovery faster and more interactive in its shopping app.
The tool enables users to identify and purchase products through real-time image recognition, marking Amazon’s latest effort to weave artificial intelligence (AI) more deeply into online shopping.
The launch builds on the existing Amazon Lens offering, which allows users to visually search by taking photos or scanning barcodes. With the new update, consumers can point their phone cameras at an item and immediately see potential matches from Amazon’s catalog displayed in a scrolling carousel. Items can be added to a cart or wish list without leaving the camera screen.
Lens Live also incorporates Rufus, Amazon’s generative AI shopping assistant. While browsing in camera view, customers are shown product summaries and suggested questions intended to streamline comparisons and research. Rufus was introduced earlier this year and is now broadly available to U.S. customers.
The system runs on Amazon Web Services’ SageMaker and OpenSearch platforms and uses on-device computer vision to identify objects before querying Amazon’s inventory. The company said the approach allows for low-latency results and more precise product matches.
Lens Live is currently available to “tens of millions” of iOS app users in the U.S., and Amazon intends to expand the capability to all shoppers in the country in the near future.
Amazon has seen strong growth in recent months after a slow period in the first few months of 2025. In the second quarter, the eCommerce giant grew its captured share of U.S. consumer retail spending by 7.6%, securing 8.8% of the market.
The launch of Lens Live comes as major retailers race to integrate generative AI into shopping, both to improve discovery and to shorten the path from browsing to checkout.
On Tuesday (Sept. 9), luxury lifestyle company Ralph Lauren announced the launch of a conversational AI shopping experience. On Sept. 4, luxury accessories membership club Vivrelle added its own “AI stylist.” Last month, eBay added an AI messaging assistant for sellers that drafts replies to buyers’ questions about items and shipping by pulling information from the seller’s listing description and order details.