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AmazonEchoLook

Amazon's Alexa personal assistant and the Echo smart speaker it runs on have been one of the company's virtually pop products since information technology launched back in 2022. Today, Amazon unveiled a follow-up device, this time with an integrated photographic camera alongside a microphone. This new product, dubbed the Echo Look, is being billed as a personal style guide for taking snapshots of your daily fashion. What sets information technology apart from your typical selfie stick is its integration with Amazon's Alexa.

Here's Amazon's clarification:

With Echo Look, you lot can take full-length photos of your daily look using merely your voice. The congenital-in LED lighting and depth-sensing camera let y'all blur the background to make your outfits pop, giving you lot clean, shareable photos. Get a live view in the Echo Look app or ask Alexa to take a short video and so yous tin can come across yourself from every angle. View recommendations based on your daily look and use Style Check for a 2d opinion on what looks all-time. And, because Alexa is congenital in the deject, she'south always getting smarter—and so will Echo Look.

The Look is really a smart play for Amazon, as is the appeal to an AI-arbitrated fashion sense. Most of us would, I think, appreciate some degree of guidance in fashion at least some of the fourth dimension. Even if you resolutely ignore the whims of the rails 99 percent of your life, you lot're going to wind up attention a wedding, funeral, or other Important Life Effect somewhen, and you'll care about how you look when you exercise. For people who engage with manner or follow current trends, a auto intelligence that could track such engagements and study back could be a tremendous time-saver, provided information technology makes accurate conclusions.

AmazonStyle

Some of the features mentioned, similar the ability to tell Alexa to accept a snapshot of yous from various angles, are pretty handy. Obviously there are ways to solve this problem with various mirror arrangements, simply such setups take upwards a lot of room and aren't ever as useful as one might like.

And and then, of course, in that location are the innumerable privacy issues — or, to put it differently:

How much money do other people get to make off your life?

That header, I call back, more accurately describes the human relationship here. Give Amazon a steady collection of images of the wear you wear, and sure, it can suggest clothing from different retailers that might map to your preferences. On the other hand, it can too gather information on your weight, pregnancy status, and where you lot buy your vesture today. Scientists have already been able to train algorithms to recognize depression based on Instagram photos. Combine these capabilities with Alexa, and y'all've got a auto intelligence capable of tracking these behaviors for the express purpose of selling you trade.

A serial of body-length photos of a person can tell you a keen deal about how they are thinking and feeling. Is the room messy? Peradventure they need more clothes storage. Are they pregnant? Cue upward some infant-themed advertising or motherhood clothes. Depressed in the wintertime? Mayhap they'd like a sun lamp or some Vitamin D. Are you overweight? Here'south some ads for exercise equipment and dubious diet pills. Does your weight yo-yo? Hither's some self-assist books. And if you wanted to build a truly robust database of facial tracking software, what amend way to do information technology than to use the images users self-submit in all types of light, clothing, and with diverse styles of makeup or facial hair? Speaking of which, if y'all're planning to grow out that beard, mayhap you'd be interested in this Gillette bristles trimming kit? [I might, honestly. -Ed]

The corking promise of car learning is that it tin free us from our ain biases and shallow understanding of a topic. If you're overweight or suffer from social feet, a neutral fashion tool that tin requite advice without the weight of pesky human bias might seem a godsend. Human beings are cruel. Machines — or at least the humanoid version of machines nosotros run into exemplified in characters like Data — are not. But this vision of AI as a neutral, fact-based evaluation arrangement is a fantasy. In reality, algorithms are proving to be merely as biased as the people who write them. Humans, information technology turns out, suck at unbiased algorithms.

EchoLook

Zeynep Tufekci has a tweetstorm worth reading on the topic, discussing its various ramifications and potential risks. I'm not as concerned about Amazon selling data to third parties — that'south non really Amazon's business concern model — but at the same time, it doesn't need to sell data to tertiary parties. It already runs one of the largest commerce businesses in the world.

The Echo Expect is designed to utilize Amazon's own security systems (which should help secure it from hacks), and it can be turned off via a hardware switch. Amazon has also stated that information technology only listens if you lot give it a specific control, and that a ring on the device will turn blueish when its listening. Images are uploaded into the Amazon cloud automatically, where they remain until manually deleted. The $199.99 Echo Look is currently bachelor exclusively by invitation, though Amazon will probable open information technology upward to Prime customers and then the wider public within the adjacent 6-12 months.