Snapchat Is Now Working On An Amazon-Powered 'Visual Search' Feature

With Instagram Stories taking a major lead over Snapchat, the visitor is now looking to expand its scope beyond its popular AR camera furnishings and turn your camera into a visual search tool.

Offset spotted by app researcher Ishan Agarwal (via TechCrunch), the code hinting towards the arrival of a 'visual search' feature has been found buried in Snapchat's Android app.

Snapchat is working on this unreleased characteristic (codenamed Hawkeye) that lets you press and concur on the screen to scan objects and be pointed to a list of Amazon results related to the same. It is, however, merely i of the many features that will be baked into the app.

The clarification of this feature inside the app's code reads, "Press and hold to identify an object, vocal, barcode, and more than! This works past sending data to Amazon, Shazam, and other partners." Snapchat already allows you to scan Snap codes and recognize songs via Shazam, so this feature will simply peak-off the existing functionality.

There'due south currently no word on how exactly Snapchat's 'visual search' characteristic volition work merely the hidden code suggests that you lot would starting time need to capture a photo so the app volition pull up Amazon listings related to everything information technology sees in the frame. These are expected to be shown in 'context cards' at the bottom of the screen, where you tin can click the link to buy the product or share a link to it with your friends.

If Snapchat is unable to recognize any products in the photo so you will see an error message that says 'Bummer, we didn't take hold of that!' and you might need to browse the photograph once again. This feature sounds a lot familiar to Google Lens or Pinterest Lens in overall functionality, where underlying machine learning-powered algorithms help you recognize the objects.

If this code leak turns out to be true and Snapchat is actually partnering with Amazon then this visual search feature could soon add together more than value to the platform and add yet another revenue source to the struggling platform. The company'due south userbase has become stagnant and going public hasn't helped much either, plus Instagram is building new features for Stories day after twenty-four hour period. So, are yous still using Snapchat? Tell u.s. in the comments below.