Echo Look

» see amazon.com/echo-look as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

echo look was a small white box with a depth-sensing camera at the top, sold by amazon for about $200 starting april 2017 on invitation. you mounted it on a wall, stood in front of it in two different outfits, and the style check feature compared them with what amazon called fashion specialists plus a machine learning model. the rating came back as a percentage. general availability followed in june 2018. on may 28 2020 amazon emailed every owner that the device would stop working on july 24 2020.

this was an amazon-only device sold through amazon.com in the united states. it never officially shipped to turkey. echo look was region-coded at the marketplace layer: alexa shopping at the time was a us catalog and a us style-advice service. i could not have bought one without a forwarding setup, and there was no reason to.

this sat in the part of the smart-home graveyard that exists because amazon will try anything that involves selling more clothes. the device was reported on extensively at launch for its privacy implications: a camera in your bedroom that always-on listened and uploaded full-body photos to amazon servers for fashion advice. the eff and several outlets flagged it. amazon defended the privacy model. then sales were small enough that the question stopped mattering.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it actually was ~

under the hood echo look was a depth camera with a four-led ring and an alexa speaker built into the base. the photos uploaded to amazon, where a combination of human fashion specialists and a style-check ml model produced the rating. amazon was clear that the photos were used to train the model. the device shipped with an app for browsing your wardrobe history. the most-used feature was the photo-taking itself, not the style advice.

~ the day it died ~

the may 2020 email said echo look would stop working on july 24 2020. owners were told to delete their accounts to wipe their photos, with amazon offering an additional $25 amazon credit to anyone who returned the device. the style check feature itself was rolled into the regular alexa shopping app, where it lived as a software feature for a few more years. the camera-in-the-bedroom hardware was the dead part.

echo look fits into the amazon hardware graveyard alongside the dash button and the fire phone, the other two pieces of amazon-only consumer hardware that never reached a successful second generation. amazon ships hardware on the theory that one in twenty bets will hit. echo look was not one of the twenty.

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