Gadgetory

amazon has made another echo speaker and this time it's the echo look this one not only works with Alexa Amazon voice assistant but it has a camera that's going to take a picture of you and then later on judge your outfit this is a real thing Amazon first announced this echo look back in April but there's a catch you actually can't buy it just yet it's available by invitation only from Amazon on amazon.com so for the purpose of this review we ordered it on eBay for a little bit more than its retail price which is $200 so for $200 what you actually get this is an Alexa enabled device so it works with Amazon's virtual assistant Alexa you can shout to it from across the room and using this for microphone array at the top of it it will hear you and it will respond with certain things depending what you ask it but the main event is really the camera because this is what makes it the echo look there are four LED lights right here in the front so it's light up when you ask it to take a photo or a video of you this right here is an RGB camera now it appears that that is the only camera but we actually saw a tear down of this and behind this panel here there's at least one other camera including a depth camera and that comes into play with how the photos eventually come out but I'll get into that in a bit there's an on/off button on the side here it's of course Wi-Fi connected it has Bluetooth but that's really only for the pairing and setup process and it has this base here that you can unscrew and through and it tilts forward as you need it to as well also there's a wall now in case you wanted to mount it on your wall so that's your hardware how does this actually work well you're supposed to put it somewhere in your room or your house where at that shoulder level you point it a little bit downward towards you you stand in front of it and you say oh XS take a photo or Alexa take a video and it takes a quick photo of you or six second video the point is that it's supposed to capture the outfit you're wearing at that and then it stores it in a separate app as your daily look overtime of course you just kind of build up this catalogue of look and you ask you'll notice there's this blur around the edges of the still image which makes you and your outfit really pop into frame and then just blurs out the background behind you this is where the depth camera comes into play and the images come out like this by default I kind of liked it to be honest but some of my photographer colleagues of the verge saw it and said you and some of you might not like it so you can always disable that by tapping the pop button here in the app but the real benefit of it is supposed to be well Amazon wants you to shop more right I mean the end of the day and that's what Amazon is all about you can explore similar items that will point you towards other items on amazon.com and you could possibly buy based on what you're already wearing the more interesting feature is something called style check and this is where Amazon gets judgey basically it's judging your outfit you can compare two different outfits side by side after about a minute you get a response back from the app that will tell you which outfit looks better this is done through a combination of machine learning and Amazon's own in-house fashion expert Amazon says that it's basing the style check decisions off of color fits trends and style that's great right but a lot of times this stuff is subjective you might really like an outfit and whatever reason style check doesn't I did sort of notice a couple of patterns for example if I was wearing a blouse in one photo and then I put a jacket on over the blouse in another photo it would often reject this jacket now that may be based on whether because the app is also pulling in contextual information like whether but it may also just be that bulky less form-fitting stuff was seen as less favorable for example if I wore a big sweatshirt as part of a workout outfit and then I put on sort of a tight fitting jacket it would generally go for the tight fitting jacket over the big bulky sweatshirt I did want to see if there was any type of bias at all towards more sealing outfits so I dug up an old tube top that I haven't legitimately worn and probably a dozen years and tried that on and compares it to a photo of me and just wearing a white t-shirt and surprisingly Cyril check went for the white t-shirt so I guess it's time to officially retire the tube top I also tried on other random stuff like pyjamas slogan t-shirts I tried on a wetsuit to see if Amazon would make a recommendation for other wetsuits I had all kinds of mixed results it was honestly really interesting and really fun but at the end of the day the important thing to remember is that Amazon wants you to shop more it wants you to buy stuff on amazon.com Amazon already knows what kind of toilet paper you buy what paper towels you get with dishwasher soap you order it has this profile of you already Amazon is trying to build up its fashion business and this is another attempt to build a better profile of you as a shopper to know exactly what kind of clothes you're already wearing and what kind of pleasure more inclined to buy now some of you may be looking at this and say hell no I do not want an Amazon powered camera in my home and that's an understandable sentiment any internet-connected device in your home has a potential to be vulnerable be hacked or just be sending data back to someone's cloud you really want them to have that kind of information now amazon says that if you've turned the look off that the microphone and the camera are electronically disabled so it's not capturing any information to send back to amazon's cloud also it says that if it is on and you are sending in information that images voice data anything else is being sent to the cloud is encrypted so if you don't have privacy concerns and you don't mind Amazon having that much more data about what you're interested in buying and at the end of the day you like the idea of an AI telling you what you should wear then you'll probably really like the Amazon echo look because it is kind of a nifty gadget but I also think that what you wear is such a subjective and personal thing and a lot of people already kind of know or have a sense of what looks good on them that makes them feel good what makes them happy to wear you don't necessarily need nai to tell you what to wear you just sort of just sort of know so in a lot of ways this first version is benefiting Amazon probably more than it's benefiting you alexa take your photo