Amazon’s new Fire smartphone will feature advanced image recognition that can use a photo to access media, or look up information about items in the physical world.
This feature is among the ways Amazon is seeking to differentiate its late-to-the-game smartphone from a sea of others in a world dominated by Apple, Google and Samsung. Research firm IDC projected that some 1.2 billion new devices will be shipped this year.
At the Seattle unveiling, Chief Executive Jeff Bezos demonstrated how quickly the feature, dubbed “Firefly,” works. He showed how photos of the cover of a book, a DVD and a bar code were turned into a link to a downloadable song and an episode of the HBO series, “Game of Thrones.” It can also be used to read phone numbers off a sign.
“Firefly recognizes over 100 million items,” Bezos said onstage.
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