What Happened
Pinterest has updated its visual search and discovery feature Lens to make it more useful for food enthusiasts to find recipes and dishes. The new update enables “full dish recognition” for Lens, which let Pinterest users snap a picture of a particular dish, such as quesadillas or fried chicken, and get corresponding recipes for that dish, along with similar-looking dishes. Previously, users can use Lens to get recommended recipes when they snap pictures of the ingredients they have. Pinterest rolled out Lens to all U.S. users in March, and it is integrated with Samsung’s voice assistant Bixby to power visual search on the new Galaxy 8 phones.
What Brands Need To Do
This update for the Pinterest Lens feature should give its search platform a boost and make it more useful for Pinterest’s over 175 million users, who, according to the company, spent 5% more on groceries than the national average. Pinterest have long been a popular platform among marketers with its quick product roll-out, coupled with its emphasis on search and scale. This Lens feature puts it in an advantageous position of developing consumer-facing visual discovery tools, which are increasingly gaining traction as a new way to understand user intent and collect contextual data.
With the quick advancement of machine learning and AI-powered solutions, we are starting to see examples of brands primarily using the camera as an input source of the mobile user interface. This trend should provide some inspiration to brands looking to update their digital user experience to be more intuitive and convenient for mobile users.
Source: AdWeek
