Amazon's New Lens Live Lets You Shop By Just Scanning

Shopping online usually starts with a search bar, but sometimes you don’t even know what to type or what the name of the item is. It could be a dress on Instagram, sneakers on someone jogging on the street, or furniture in your friend’s shop. Usually, that would mean typing endless keywords into a search bar, hoping for the right match, and we know how stressful that can get.

That’s where Amazon wants to change the game. With Lens Live, its new AI-powered visual search tool, your phone camera becomes the fastest way to shop. Just point it at an item and Amazon instantly pulls up real-time product matches, complete with insights from its AI shopping assistant. 

What is Amazon Lens Live?

Lens Live is the new upgrade to Amazon’s existing visual search tool, Amazon Lens, which first launched in March 2025. The difference is that instead of taking a picture or uploading an image, Lens Live instantly scans whatever your camera is pointed at and pulls up matching products in real time. The results are displayed in a swipeable carousel at the bottom of the app, allowing for quick and seamless comparisons.

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Key Features of Lens Live

• Instant scanning: As soon as you open the Lens camera, it begins detecting products automatically.
  

• Real-time matches: A deep-learning model compares what’s on your screen with billions of Amazon listings to show exact or similar items.
  

• Tap-to-focus: Zoom in on specific objects by tapping them in the viewfinder.
  

• One-tap shopping: Add items to your cart or wish list without leaving camera view.
  

• AI insights with Rufus: Amazon’s shopping assistant, Rufus, appears beneath the product carousel with quick summaries and suggested questions about what makes each item stand out.

The Bigger Picture

Lens Live takes the guesswork out of online shopping. Instead of struggling with the right keywords, you can now shop by sight. For Amazon, it’s another step in building an AI-driven shopping experience that feels as natural as looking around you.

Under the hood, Lens Live runs on Amazon OpenSearch and Amazon SageMaker, scaling machine learning models for real-time performance. A lightweight computer vision model works on-device to detect products instantly, while a deep learning embedding model compares results against Amazon’s vast catalogue. Combined with Rufus, Amazon’s large language model shopping assistant, Lens Live matches products, and it also helps customers understand them better.

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Availability

For now, Lens Live is only available to tens of millions of customers in the U.S. using the Amazon Shopping app on iOS. Amazon says it will continue rolling out to more U.S. customers soon. Other regions may have to wait before they can try the feature.

This new feature means Amazon is doubling down on its vision of making product discovery as easy as ever, compared to what online shopping used to be a couple of years ago. By blending real-time AI detection with conversational shopping insights, it becomes a shopping companion. Also, while it’s U.S.-only for now, this kind of tech sets the tone for how the future of online shopping could look everywhere and across other platforms.