Amazon’s newest AI-powered function was revealed this week. Lens Live plans to turn users into even more effective consumers by pairing the company’s Rufus AI with a smartphone camera to let you buy anything you can see. Assuming it exists for sale on Amazon, of course.

Lens Live is an extension of Amazon Lens, which uses a photograph, image, or bar code to find similar products on the online shopping platform. The difference here is that you can point the Live version at a specific scene — for example, restaurant decor — and it’ll pick out and identify similar (or perhaps the same) products for sale.

Lens Live performance

If it all seems a little dystopian, you’re not technically wrong. It’s all designed to be terribly convenient for the impulse shoppers out there who see a pair of shoes, a jacket, or a motor vehicle they must have right this minute. The way Live Lens works is that it’ll identify potential products, with the user able to select specific items through a live camera lens if the AI is overburdened with choice.

Selected items will pop up on a carousel of comparable products available on Amazon, with users able to add them to their cart at the touch of a button. Wishlisting said product(s) is similarly simple.

According to Amazon, the function’s “real-time detection identifies the primary objects automatically, creating a smooth experience that requires minimal customer interaction. Lens Live uses a deep learning visual embedding model to match the customer’s view against billions of Amazon products, retrieving exact or highly similar items.”

Don’t count on getting to use it here in South Africa for a while, though. Live Lens has already launched for a broad number of American iOS users, with millions more users gaining access in the coming days. A South African launch will have to wait until the local platform offers the sort of variety the American version of Amazon does.