Amazon’s New Echo Look Puts a Camera, Microphone in Your Bedroom
Amazon’s Alexa personal assistant and the Echo smart speaker it runs on have been one of the company’s most popular products since it launched back in 2014. Today, Amazon unveiled a follow-up device, this time with an integrated 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 it apart from your typical selfie stick is its integration with Amazon’s Alexa.
Here’s Amazon’s description:
With Echo Look, you can take full-length photos of your daily look using just your voice.
The built-in LED lighting and depth-sensing camera let you blur the background to make your outfits pop, giving you clean, shareable photos. Get a live view in the Echo Look app or ask Alexa to take a short video so you can see yourself from every angle. View recommendations based on your daily look and use Style Check for a second opinion on what looks best. And, because Alexa is built in the cloud, she’s always getting smarter—and so will Echo Look.
The Look is actually 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 time. Even if you resolutely ignore the whims of the runway 99 percent of your life, you’re going to wind up attending a wedding, funeral, or other Important Life Event eventually, and you’ll care about how you look when you do. For people who engage with fashion or follow current trends, a machine intelligence that could track such engagements and report back could be a tremendous time-saver, provided it makes accurate conclusions.
Some of the features mentioned, like the ability to tell Alexa to take a snapshot of you from various angles, are pretty handy. Obviously there are ways to solve this problem with various mirror arrangements, but such setups take up a lot of room and aren’t always as useful as one might like.
And then, of course, there 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 think, more accurately describes the relationship here. Give Amazon a steady collection of images of the clothing you wear, and sure, it can suggest clothing from different retailers that might map to your preferences. On the other hand, it can also gather information on your weight, pregnancy status, and where you buy your clothing today. Scientists have already been able to train algorithms to based on Instagram photos. Combine these capabilities with Alexa, and you’ve got a machine intelligence capable of tracking these behaviors for the express purpose of selling you merchandise.
A series of body-length photos of a person can tell you a great deal about how they are thinking and feeling. Is the room messy? Maybe they need more clothes storage. Are they pregnant? Cue up some baby-themed advertising or maternity clothes. Depressed in the winter? Maybe they’d like a sun lamp or some Vitamin D. Are you overweight? Here’s some ads for exercise equipment and dubious diet pills. Does your weight yo-yo? Here’s some self-help books. And if you wanted to build a truly robust database of facial tracking software, what better way to do it than to use the images users self-submit in all types of light, clothing, and with various styles of makeup or facial hair? Speaking of which, if you’re planning to grow out that beard, maybe you’d be interested in this Gillette beard trimming kit? [I might, honestly. -Ed]
The great promise of machine learning is that it can free us from our own biases and shallow understanding of a topic. If you’re overweight or suffer from social anxiety, a neutral fashion tool that can give 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 we see exemplified in characters like Data — are not. But this vision of AI as a neutral, fact-based evaluation system is a fantasy. In reality, algorithms are proving to be just as biased as the people who write them. Humans, it turns out, at unbiased .
Zeynep Tufekci has a 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’s not really Amazon’s business model — but at the same time, it doesn’t need to sell data to third parties. It already runs one of the largest commerce businesses in the world.
The Echo Look is designed to use 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 it only listens if you give it a specific command, and that a ring on the device will turn blue when its listening. Images are uploaded into the Amazon cloud automatically, where they remain until manually deleted. The $199.99 is currently available exclusively by invitation, though Amazon will likely open it up to Prime customers and then the wider public within the next 6-12 months.