Pinterest has announced a set of cool new features aimed at getting you to shop more through the wonders of technology. You’ll soon be able to snap up any product which catches your eye in real life by clicking a photo of it and searching for similar products online.
This new camera search technology depends on a combination of computer vision and deep learning to find matching products. It’ll be interesting to see how accurate it is at finding stuff, since this will probably be the key factor in determining whether the feature is a hit with users. If it works, the tool could establish Pinterest as a successful blend of social media and e-commerce.
Pinterest has been making steady strides towards such a status quo. The brand claims that over 55% of its members utilize the site to shop compared to other social media platforms. It had capitalized on this trend by launching Buyable Pins last year with nearly 200 products up for grabs. That number has now risen to 10 million unique items.
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Searching for these products is about to get a lot easier thanks to the other big addition to Pinterest. The app is introducing a new automatic object detection feature which can search for products within a pinned image. For instance, if you see a photo of a room with objects which you’re interesting in buying, you simply have to tap on the visual search icon on the top right corner of the screen to activate it.
The automatic object detection tool is supposed to narrow down on the searchable products such as a sofa or lamp and highlight them with dots. Other major new additions to Pinterest include the ability to take your shopping bag across platforms, letting you add something on your phone and buy it on your laptop, and a new Pinterest Shop for curated products.
Pinterest will be rolling out these new abilities over the course of the coming weeks. You can download the app via the Play Store or App Store.