Wednesday, April 01, 2009

Experiment - Amazon Remembers



Amazon remembers is an innovative and incredibly fast product image recognition service by Amazon currently available only on iPhone. I'm totally blown away by it.

How it works
Go to Amazon app on iPhone, Remembers Section, Click a picture with your iPhone, Send it to Amazon. Amazon will respond with a either an exact item or a matching one. All this right from within the app. You can view the results on your iPhone app or on your Amazon homepage.

I tried this service with following 5 items and within a minute or two I had Amazon respond with the exact item link in 3 out of 5 cases. One was a close match and the other a disaster.

1) On left above is the smoothie cup from my cafeteria for which Amazon found the adjoining matchin cup.


2) Picture of a poster. Amazon found it instantly but it had taken me over an hour.




3) I sent a valid bar code. Instead of the item Amazon found me this book on bar codes.




4) When I sent the cover of book whose bar code I had used in #3 above. Amazon promptly found it.




5) Finding a toy was easy too. This search took Amazon a little longer. Although it 's not an exact match but it's pretty close.



Overall, Amazon Remembers is a lot of fun and really useful in finding items which are difficult to describe. And hey it's someone else doing the work for you.