mturk

Amazon finally came out with an official iPhone application today. It works pretty well much like their iPhone ready website. A new feature that was introduced is the experimental “Amazon Remembers” feature.

With Amazon Remembers you can take a photo of a product anywhere and it is then uploaded to Amazon’s servers. From there some magic happens and usually within a few minutes there is a link to the product on Amazon.com. I was impressed with the accuracy when I tried it. I not only identified the sharpie I photographed but picked the correct size.

How does it work?

“We also use a community of real people to research your photo and try to match it to a similar product on Amazon.com”.

They are using their own service Mechanical Turk. Someone is sitting on the couch looking up your photo on Mechanical Turk and posting the link. Then magically it appears on your Amazon account. Turk really is “Artificial Artificial Intelligence”. Amazon is paying 10 cents to someone every time a link to the proper item on their website is identified and delivered to you.