Amazon has a new Echo out today, as Dan Moren explains:
In addition to all the usual Alexa features, you can tell the Echo Look to take a photo or a video, and the result will pop up in the Echo Look companion app on your phone, letting you tell whether the outfit you’ve got on works. A depth of field effect—à la the iPhone 7 Plus’s Portrait Mode—blurs the background and brings you and your outfit into the foreground. Short videos let you spin around to see yourself from all angles.
There are a couple other related features in the Look: one is the ability to build a lookbook that lets you scroll back through a log of all the outfits you’ve worn and snapped pictures of, letting you find favorites, dispose of ones you don’t wear much, and, I guess help make sure you don’t wear the same thing every day? The other is a more interactive Style Check, which Amazon says combines machine learning with advice from fashion specialists: snap photos of yourself in two different outfits, submit them, and you’ll get advice as to which works better based on fit, current trends, and more. (As with many machine learning algorithms, it supposedly gets better the more you use it.)
I wear jeans, podcast t-shirts and Chuck Taylors every day of my life,1 so this $199 Echo isn’t for me.
However, I find it super interesting that Amazon has launched an assistant product with a very specific set of tools onboard. Up until this point, Siri, Google Assistant and Alexa have been extremely broad in their use cases.
- For the 60 days a year when it is cold in Memphis, I have a wide range of gray and black hoodies. ↩