iPhone to get human-powered Amazon product search!
Well now this is pretty damned cool. Following hot on the heels of iPhone apps like SnapTell, Amazon is taking the whole photo-based product search philosophy to a new level.
Coming tomorrow (hopefully) to the iPhone App Store, is an Amazon Mobile Search App which will apparently let you take a picture of ANYTHING and magically bring you to it’s amazon product page if it has one.
Here’s some more information from the New York Times:
Amazon.com Invades the Apple App Store
By Brad StoneAmazon.com will join the iPhone frenzy on Wednesday with a new application available free for download through Apple’s App Store.
The software is relatively straightforward, offering a way for iPhone or iPod Touch owners to browse through all the products offered by Amazon.com, as well as by third-party retailers like Target and Macy’s that make their products available online through Amazon.
There is, however, one unusual and noteworthy aspect of the app called Amazon Remembers, which Amazon is calling “experimental.” The tool lets users take a photograph of any product they see in the real world. The photos are then uploaded to Amazon and turned over to the far-flung freelance workers in Amazon’s Mechanical Turk program, who will try to match them with products for sale on Amazon.com. The results will not be instantaneous (between 5 minutes and 24 hours, the company says), but the idea is to entice consumers to buy products from Amazon instead of its offline rivals.
Amazon Remembers is similar to other features Amazon has introduced this year in its ongoing effort to filch sales from other Web sites and retailers. TextBuyIt, a mobile messaging service introduced in April, lets people send a text message to Amazon at 262966 with the name of a product or a search term. It then replies with a number of buying options.
Another new feature that Amazon introduced this year, Universal Wish List, is a Web browser toolbar that lets people directly add the products they covet to their Amazon account when they see them on other Web sites.
This is really pretty damned cool. Though It’s a shame that the results are less than instantaneous. I wish that Amazon had applied a two-fold approach to this application. For example, if you take a picture of a book or dvd cover, it would first get put through the SnapTell like algorithm approach. If it was successful, you get instant results. If not, you get a message that you’ve been sent into an extented search queue, and that you should get results in within a couple of hours.
Of course I can still run SnapTell on my phone for the simple stuff, and send the more complicated things to Amazon, but it would have been nice to do this all in one app.
Either way I’ll be checking the App Store for this one as soon as it’s released.