Amazon has an iphone app. Their app lets you take pictures of things, and then they match it to products they sell.
Holy S$^@!
Undoubtedly they’re using Mechanical Turk to have bored humans do the matching. That system has been in place for years, and I even gave it a try to get a bunch of candidate names for a new band a while back. So how’d it do?
- Picture of Star Wars Trilogy DVD set: successfully matched.
- Picture of old combo VHS/DVD player’s manual: matched to current model.
- Picture of Netflix envelope of 3:10 to Yuma DVD: no match
- Picture of Abby, our cat: no match
Kinda surprised about #3.
All I can say is I hope they have some sort of skintone-screening technology in front of the human Turkers, because I’m sure there are gonna be a lot of bored college students takin’ picture of their schlongs…