You get ready every morning and then have no one to ask how you look to make sure you are not wearing the wrong shirt with the wrong shoes? Not everyone is a fashionista, right? Amazon Echo just jumped out for help with its Prime feature called Outfit Compare. You can upload a pair of selfies in different outfits and style experts will evaluate them for you. Amazon is no longer just a home assistant; it is your fashion guru too now.
The new Echo Look is just another version of Amazon Echo that comes with an added camera to help you pick out an outfit for the day. The $200 device can only be ordered by invitation for now. The original idea was to seek evaluation from human style experts, but Alexa Style Check has an artificial intelligence integration partly. The algorithm will learn from the user feedback and that of the fashion experts, and as the algorithm matures, the process may be entirely automated in the future.
The camera on Alexa is oriented so it can take a full body image, reasonably close to get a clear idea of your outfit. You can ask Alexa to either take a photo or a video to which it will apply a depth effect to blur out the background. Getting this picture on the companion app, you can go through the Look Book that contains lots of past styles, share your photo and get advice from the Style Check app.
Alexa evaluates your outfit on the basis of the fit and color combinations while keeping in view your personal preferences. If you just own lots of blacks or just have less variety in your wardrobe, you may not find Echo Look as the most helpful thing. It does suggest a future where it will learn about you and may provide you with entertainment and help in shopping. Your future shopping partner? Yes, that might happen. It is Amazon, and since day one, the focus of the Amazon technology has been commerce. Amazon started building an object recognition system a few years ago, which may bring it closer to a shopping assistant in the future like Samsung’s Bixby.
What the Echo Look won’t be studying about your appearance is your body shape, complexion or any other physical trait for that matter. The algorithm that Amazon is using to run the styling assistant is secret, and for all we know, it might use it to recommend you products from their store in the future.
The only concern that comes with any home assistant, especially the ones that come with a camera is security concerns. You have a camera, a microphone in your house, connected to the internet giving Amazon open access to all of it. But if you think of it, all smart devices do it, your phones, smart TVs, and what not. Amazon has already declared that it will store the images permanently that can be managed through the Alexa Look app.
