You know how the story goes: You see an item you absolutely must have on Instagram or in a magazine, and you try plugging a plethora of carefully-tuned terms into Google to help narrow the search. Different variations of the same words don’t work. That skirt always keeps turning up too long, the blouse just a touch too asymmetric, and that shade of blue doesn’t even come close.
Forget the mind-numbing scrolling and searching: Amazon’s new AI shopping companion will help find just what you’re after – all you have to do is upload a picture of the piece of clothing in question.
StyleSnap does exactly what it says on the tin. Find something you like? Snap a picture of it and plug it into StyleSnap, which is integrated into the Amazon iOS and Android apps. It then brings up a list of similar looking items available on the site for you to peruse, selected based on an algorithm that takes into account brand, price range and user reviews.
Amazon isn’t the first company to unveil an image-based outfit finder like StyleSnap. Apps like Wheretoget and ScreenShop do the same thing, and Chinese e-commerce giant Taobao offers the same function, extending it to virtually any object you can think of — but for shoppers who don’t want to wade through dense pages filled with Chinese or dodgy sites looking for their dream outfit, StyleSnap is a godsend.