AMAZON’S ECHO LOOK DOES MORE FOR AMAZON THAN IT DOES FOR YOUR STYLE

Over the past couple of years, Amazon’s connected devices have slowly made their way into the home with increasing levels of boldness and oddity. They range from a buy-me-now button to a barcode-scanning wand to a virtual assistant in tubular casing. At one time not long ago, the Amazon stuff in your home probably consisted of books and trinkets and cardboard boxes... all of those boxes. Now, it’s all “smart” stuff, and no one is smarter for it all than Amazon.

Using these devices generally means you have not only purchased something from Amazon, but also that Amazon can now gain even deeper knowledge about the things you’re interested in, the things you find intriguing enough to buy, and the things you’re likely to go back and buy again and again. In a lot of ways these virtual assistants are as much about assisting the companies that make them as they are about helping you.

Amazon’s new Echo Look camera is no exception. This $200 hands-free camera doubles as a speaker and runs Alexa, Amazon’s popular voice-controlled assistant. You can talk to it and ask it for the news and ask it to set timers and ask to play music and do almost all the things you would do with Alexa on another Echo device. But its main feature is its ability to take hands-free, floor-length photos of you — specifically of your clothing, which Amazon then compares to photos of other outfits you’ve stored in the compatible mobile app. Also, the app will show you similar clothing items that you can buy. From Amazon.

In recent years, since smartphones took over the developed world, there have been several apps that help you keep track of outfits and dole out style advice. You can also, of course, send photos to friends from a dressing room or from the comfort of your own home and get a second opinion pretty much immediately. But Amazon is taking a fully integrated approach: buy our hardware, use our software, and reap the benefits of our massive e-commerce site and our “you might also like this” algorithms.

The result is a slightly bizarre gadget that works as promised: it takes photos of your outfits, and the photos are nice. But in its first iteration, it serves to do more for Amazon than it does for you. The gadget subsists on the notion that you really don’t know which outfit looks better on you — and hey, sometimes you really don’t — but it also has no contextual information for where or what event you’re wearing your outfit to, which is often a big part of outfit indecision.

Also, it’s worth noting this isn’t widely available yet. Amazon is rolling out the Echo Look on a per-invitation basis. But thanks to another e-commerce site (cough eBay), I’ve had the Echo Look inside my apartment for a few weeks.

The Echo Look camera is a small, phallic-shaped piece of hardware with a flat panel on the front. Nested in its front is one visible camera lens surrounded by four small LED lights. I also happened to see a torn-down version of the Look, which revealed that the front-facing lens isn’t the only camera sensor. There’s also a depth sensor and what appears to be an illuminator hidden behind the opaque front panel.

THE ECHO LOOK IS A VOICE-CONTROLLED CAMERA THAT SNAPS A PHOTO OF YOU, THEN SENDS IT TO AN APP FOR IMMEDIATE JUDGEMENT

There’s a far-field, four-microphone array at the top of the Echo Look, fewer mics than the seven-microphone array in the tall Echo and Echo Dot puck. The reduction in microphones is less of an issue, though, than the Echo Look’s speaker, which is positioned in the back. To call this thing a “speaker” is being generous. And, because certain tasks won’t sync up across different Echo devices, I often found myself talking to my kitchen Echo only to hear the Echo Look responding from the living room, or vice versa. (Amazon’s Echo devices have a feature called Echo Spatial Perception that’s supposed to determine which device is closest to you and respond appropriately, but a few of us at The Verge have found it doesn’t always work.)

The Look rests on a small, screw-in stand that comes in the packaging, along with a wall mount if you decide to go that route. You’re supposed to position the camera at shoulder height, because that gives the Look the best perspective on your whole outfit. If you’re already an outfit-chronicler, this is one of the best qualities of this gadget: it does it for you, hands-free, full-length.

In the marketing video for this product, women wear cute scarves and pencil skirts and sweaters with eyes on them, and stand in front of makeshift closets in airy bedrooms with hardwood floors. The unsaid message is there: you’re supposed to put this camera in the bedroom. The idea of having an internet-connected camera in my bedroom was met with a fast “Nope” in my house, so my Echo Look ended up crammed on a bookshelf in the living room.

“Alexa, take a photo,” you say to the Look while you pose in front of it. A blue ring of light blinks at you three times, and then the four LEDs flash so brightly they might freak out a pet. I know because they freaked out my cat. You can also ask the camera to take a video, which gives you six seconds to spin or twirl or shift hands on hips — whatever you need to do to see all angles of the outfit you’re oh-so-unsure about. The photos tend to be flattering, with an exaggerated depth effect applied to them, making you and your outfit stand out.

These photos are sent wirelessly to a compatible mobile app, the Echo Look app. This is the first time Amazon has created a standalone app for one of its Echo devices; most times, you manage your “Alexa” products from the Amazon Alexa app. But the Echo Look app is where the style comparison feature lives, where you can compare two different outfits and find out which one is “better,” where you can see other clothing items to buy, and where you’ll try for the life of you to figure out what it is that makes one outfit better than the other.

From: https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/6/15924120/amazon-echo-look-review-camera-clothes-style