Echo Look

Echo Look was a $199 Amazon device with a built-in depth-sensing camera and LED lighting in it, purpose-built for fashion. You asked Alexa to take a photo, and the app would then capture your outfit against a blurred background. The flagship feature was Style Check, and it used a combination of machine learning and human fashion specialists to score 2 outfits head-to-head, taking into account the fit and the color and the styling and the current trends.

I served as React Native Architect on the Echo Look companion app, and as lead developer of Community Style Check, which was its crowdvoting cross-app feature. I was part of the product's entire lifecycle, from early development through general release, and then through operations, and then ultimately through its end-of-life, because Echo Look became the first Echo device Amazon ever bricked.

Echo Look App

The Echo Look companion app was a native iOS and Android app, and it featured a home feed and a social feed that were both built in React Native.

The work behind it

Three efforts on Echo Look are written up on their own:

• React Native Multi-Root Architecture, which was the rearchitecture and the build system that unblocked React Native feature development on the app, and which made me its React Native architect.
• Community Style Check, which was a crowdvoting fashion poll connecting Echo Look with Amazon Spark, the Shopping app's social feed. You captured an outfit on Echo Look, and you shared it as a poll, and then the Shopping app community voted on which of the looks was better. It was the first cross-app feature ever shipped between Echo Look and Amazon Shopping.
• Echo Look Style Feed — the social feed for sharing daily looks with auto-tagged products, published into Amazon Spark. The last major feature Echo Look shipped, and the most visited part of the app.

End of Life

Amazon stopped selling Echo Look in 2019 and discontinued it in May 2020, and the devices and their companion app ceased functioning that July, which made it the first Echo device to be discontinued and then remotely disabled. Its style capabilities carried on inside the Amazon Shopping app and on Alexa devices, by way of Style Hub.

It was a product that pushed into genuinely novel territory, because it combined a dedicated camera device with machine learning, and with human stylists, and with a social layer on top of all of it. Getting to see that product through from zero to shutdown was a formative experience for me in understanding the full arc of a hardware product.

Press

• Amazon Echo Look review — CNET
• Amazon's Echo Look lets you ask strangers what you should wear — CNET
• Amazon Echo Look and iOS app judges your wardrobe choices with machine learning — AppleInsider
• Amazon's new Echo Look device is an AI-powered stylist — ZDNet
• I let Amazon's new Echo Look choose my clothes for a week — Business Insider
• Amazon Echo Look — Mint Arrow
• Amazon Echo Look — a First-of-its-Kind Echo Focused on Style — Now Available to All U.S. Customers — Amazon Press Release
• Amazon will shut down fashion-focused Echo Look in July — CNET
• Echo Looks will cease functioning in July, as Amazon discontinues the camera — TechCrunch
• Amazon discontinues the Echo Look and migrates AI style recommendations to other apps and devices — VentureBeat