Fashion lovers are getting something they probably always wanted from Amazon. On Wednesday, the online retail giant revealed the Echo Look, a device designed for the fashion-forward.
Amazon Echo Look: your personal fashion guru
With this device, Amazon can target those who are always confused about what shirt to wear or what shoes go with it. The Echo Look Camera does all the things the original device does, from reading news headlines to telling you about the weather. But in addition, the device will now assist you with your wardrobe as well.
Amazon’s voice-controlled Echo Look — priced at $199 — hears a command and promptly takes videos and photos of the outfit the person is wearing. Further, it not only clicks photos of the outfit but also judges it using AI. It sounds a little creepy, but it surely is a step forward for fashion in the tech world.
In addition, the device takes videos, blurs the background of the picture for the user, and gives them the perfect lighting. The amazing device will do all that on a voice command. However, many will be confused about how the device can judge outfits. Amazon’s fashion algorithms are still not known completely, so we are not sure whether we can trust Echo’s built-in virtual assistant Alexa with choosing outfits.
If you want to see how it works, here is a video ad from Amazon.
Not just amazing, but creepy too
Along with being amazing, it’s a bit scary too because the user is paying the e-commerce giant to put a camera and microphone in their bedroom. The company even admits that the photos clicked by the device will be stored on its computers indefinitely until the user deletes them manually, notes Business Insider.
Along with your photos, Amazon will also get a lot of data about you, like the type of chinos you sport. The pictures can reveal socioeconomic status, whether you’re married, religious affiliation, and potentially a lot more, notes Mashable.
Zeynep Tufekci, an associate professor at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina, tweeted that the online retail giant will not just be able to sell the user clothes or judge them with this data, but it could also analyze if the user is depressed or pregnant and much else.
Today, while apps like Instagram, Snapchat and other photo-sharing and editing apps are all the rage, the Echo Look is surely a bold move. Only time will tell if it ends up a huge disappointment like the Fire Phone or a hit like the original Amazon Echo.
Last year after the flop of the Fire phone, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said, “The size of your mistakes needs to grow along with” the company. “If it doesn’t, you’re not going to be inventing at scale that can actually move the needle.”
