I had to try out Amazon’s new iPhone app because I had read about an experimental feature called Amazon Remembers. Basically, with Amazon Remembers, you take a picture of something and Amazon finds something similar in its inventory and sends you back a link.

I sent Amazon Remembers this photo:

Admittedly, this is a Bang and Olufsen stereo that is no longer made, and Amazon does not sell B&O as far as I know. I was trying to see just how good Amazon Remembers was.

Here’s what they found for me:

OK, it’s not the same, but not bad either. It might be the closest they have, although I think there might be something from Bose that comes closer.

I was disappointed to learn that this was not anything like true AI. I was hoping to discover that there was some sophisticated algorithm that traced the outline of the photo and did some kind of pattern matching to return a result. Maybe that’s next. It’s not that far fetched. An iPhone app called Listen, introduced earlier this year allows users to place the phone within listening distance of a radio to identify the song and artist currently being played. This is not an AI app and uses a technology called TrackID to identify the song, but it is completely automated.

According to Wired, Amazon Remembers is powered by Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which is a micro-contractor service (my name for it) that “sells” offshore labor in tiny increments.As soon as I took the photo of my B&O, it was sent to a contractor who looked at it, found a match in Amazon’s catalog, and generated the message back to me.

It’s only fitting that Amazon’s Mechanical Turk imitates an artificial intelligence machine that is actually run by humans hidden behind the scenes. The original Mechanical Turk was an 18th century chess playing machine, represented as an automaton but most likely had a smallish person crouched inside executing chess moves against a human player.

The original Mechanical Turk

The Amazon iPhone app also offers many standard Amazon features like product search, ordering, a shopping cart and recommendations. (You can download it from the iPhone App Store.)

Tags: Amazon Remembers, iPhone app, Mechanical Turk, Artificial Intelligence, Listen, TrackID