WeChat has launched an SDK (Software Development Kit) this week for its image recognition technology. This will allow the public to add the said capability to their own WeChat accounts, according to Venturebeat.

The news comes several months after the company allowed third parties to use its speech recognition and speech-to-text conversion technologies, the report added.

WeChat's 5.0 version, which was released in August 2013, already came with the capability to recognize books and music albums by scanning product covers. Along with this, the app added pages of products with links that lead to e-commerce platforms for purchases, the report detailed.

Now that the image recognition capability has been opened to third-party users, they can now use their WeChat accounts to scan product covers and read reviews about certain items. They can also buy the said product via the link to an online retailer provided by WeChat. The service, which is free of charge, will be upgraded later on to add more capabilities, VentureBeat reported.