Snapchat is continuously trying to innovate its lenses, this time by making them a tad bit more interactive. The company has just launched a bunch of new ones that can display different effects when talked to.
Among the new lenses are ones that will ask users to say "Hi" or "Love" or "Wow," after which they will trigger certain animations. Another lens displays a little cat paw gesturing the okay symbol when the user says, "Okay." There's also one that automatically launches a zooming effect when the user says, "Yes."
This isn't the fire time Snap Inc. has released lenses that incorporate audio in some fashion, but these new lenses are actually the first to recognize speech and promptly respond to them.
Snapchat Outs New Lenses With Speech Recognition Abilities
The company plans to make around five to six different lenses available to all users within the next week. They're poised to appear periodically in the lens carousel along with the others starting Wednesday, Aug. 1. They will work just like any regular lens, but Snap Inc. says it will display instructions to guide users along the way.
Weird, unique, and fun lenses have always been one of the core elements of Snapchat and a huge part of what makes it stand out among the social media landscape. It has continuously launched lenses with useful functions too such as Word Lenses that add augmented reality elements to any given scene, selfie-based games, and lenses that let users manipulate the world around them. Rumor has it that Snap Inc. is working with Amazon to create a feature called Visual Search, which will apparently be able to recognize products and then bring up their Amazon listings.
The Future Of Snapchat Lenses
For Snap Inc., lenses are crucial to its business because they help maintain Snapchat's core identity even as other major companies — cough, Facebook, cough — try to clone it. They also keep users engaged, and could potentially be a platform for advertisers and broadcasters down the line, as TechCrunch notes.
As it stands, Snap Inc. is bleeding money. It has noted in the past that it will focus on keeping its user base loyal to Snapchat instead of aggressively chasing after new ones — in other words, quality over quantity. Creating unique lenses is one such way of convincing current Snapchat users to keep on opening the app and sharing content, but the company has to do more than that if it intends to topple Facebook.
Snapchat is available as a free download on iOS and Android.
