The Race To Drive Commerce With 'Computer Vision'

An interesting question is whether these 'intelligent assistants' will be allowed to drive business primarily to their sites, or whether popular demand for a more complete solution as well as potential regulatory insistence on more value neutral services will eventually ensure breaches in the 'walled garden' approach to marketing that appears to now prevail. JL

Khari Johnson reports in Venture Beat:

Smart speakers are expected to be in 75 percent of U.S. homes by 2020. Amazon's Style Check computer vision will be able to tell people what clothes to wear and to stream live video, but security, mood monitoring, and other visual services (are) next steps. EBay introduced Shopbot, Mode.ai’s ecommerce Messenger bot as well as Pinterest’s Lens  also power visual search. The race is on to use intelligent assistants to drive ecommerce with computer vision.
Amazon debuted the Echo Look, an Alexa-enabled speaker for your home that has a camera inside.
Its Style Check computer vision, Amazon said, will be able to tell people what clothes to wear and to stream live video, but of course that’s just the start. Security, mood monitoring, and other visual services seem like obvious next steps.
Whether or not additional services are made available for Echo Look in the future, any device with computer vision and Alexa will no doubt lead its owners to the Amazon.com marketplace.
The race is clearly on to use intelligent assistants like Alexa as well as bots and apps to drive ecommerce with computer vision. Last fall, EBay introduced its Shopbot. In recent weeks we’ve seen the debut of startup Mode.ai’s ecommerce Messenger bot as well as Pinterest’s Lens, which also powers visual search (with Amazon) for the new Samsung Galaxy S8.
It seems increasingly the case that it’s not just natural language understanding (NLU) that defines smart bots, but also computer vision. Given the fact that smart speakers are expected to be in 75 percent of U.S. homes by 2020, what bots can see — and the quality of the computer vision used by a bot — is going to be worth a lot to brands and businesses.