Amazon's Echo Look, a $199 hands-free camera and personal style assistant, went on sale to all customers today.
If you’re anything like me, deciding what to wear can be a time-consuming task. Sometimes I try on five different outfits, tossing rejected items onto my desk chair and creating a daunting pile of clothes that I’ll have to refold later. And after all that, I still don’t always feel satisfied or comfortable in what I’ve chosen. So I was intrigued when I heard about Amazon’s Echo Look— what the company refers to as a “style assistant.”
The Echo Look connects to Amazon’s virtual assistant, Alexa, which means it has the same capabilities as other Echo products, but the style assistant is what sets the Look apart.
The Echo Look takes full-length photos or 6-second videos of your outfit, so you can create a catalog of “looks” and store those images in collections for future perusal on the accompanying app. Those collections can be separated by season, color, type of event, or any other categories you choose. This feature could be useful if your closet is so full of clothes you need help remembering what’s in it, but for me, it seemed unnecessary.
I was more interested in the style-check feature, which compares photos of two different outfits and tells you which one looks better. To get a sense of how the Echo Look and app works, I let the Echo Look choose my outfits for a week. Here's how it went:
UNBOXING: The Echo Look comes with a screw-in stand, wall mount, and power cord.
DAY 1: On the first day, I decided to keep the outfits simple. White button-up tucked into light blue jeans vs. black turtleneck and dark denim jeans.
The white shirt and lighter jeans won by a narrow margin, because, according to the results, the colors match better. But it also said that the shoes are better in the losing outfit. So, I put the black boots with the winning outfit and ran the style check again. That increased the winning margin by 2 percentage points.
The Echo Look analyzes your outfits by running machine-learning algorithms and consulting a team of “fashion specialists.” You can also ask for style recommendations— and this is where Amazon benefits. If you have pants you love, but only one or two shirts that go with them, you can ask for suggestions of other shirts that would look good and it will direct you toward some options on Amazon.com.
DAY 2: On the second day, I tried outfits with a little more color and style variation. Tan-striped tank and black pants vs. black and blue denim jumpsuit.
These results are close. The tank and pants were deemed a better shape and fit, but the app said the color of the jumpsuit looks better on me. So in this case, it seems like color is more important than fit, since the jumpsuit got a higher rating than the tank and pants. But it’s also possible that it chose the jumpsuit because they are popular right now, and Amazon says the app partially decides based on “current trends.”
See the rest of the story at Business Insider