Amazon Fire Phone Includes Firefly Recognition Feature

The Fire Phone by Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) is now official and includes a number of new features, one of which in particular truly captures the concept of a “smartphone.”

The Firefly feature on the Fire Phone uses its camera to recognize different products, which it in turn can then find on the Amazon.com database. Firefly can recognize books, DVDs, phone numbers, QR codes, CDs, URLs, games, and bar codes, among many items.

The feature can also pick up audio to recognize music and TV shows, which can then be found on Amazon Music and other services like iHeartRadio. Users can utilize Firefly to find products they intend to buy, view details pages and then make purchases.

Firefly’s functionality goes beyond media. The feature can recognize different things and pull up more information on the topic. For example, at the Amazon Fire Phone press event in Seattle on Wednesday, Firefly recognized the painting “Cornflowers” by Sergei Osipov and pulled up a Wikipedia entry.

Firefly can also recognize phone numbers, email addresses and street signs. According to Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos, Firefly can identify over a hundred million items.

But demonstrations of the feature were not without issues; Firefly is susceptible to complications like glare, wrinkles and curves, which can affect its recognition ability. However, the feature can also anticipate errors. For example, while attempting to decipher a phone number, Firefly was able to determine, what appeared to be (206) 703-9951 was actually (206) 708-9951.

Users will have easy access to Firefly through a dedicated button on the Fire Phone handset.

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