Samsung’s New AI Partnership Could Reshape How You Outfit Your Wardrobe
Summary
- Glance AI creates hyper-personal recommendations and realistic visualizations based on individuals’ bodies and decades of commercial and fashion trends.
- The app aims to revolutionize how we interact with phones by integrating fashion inspiration into the lock screen experience.
- Glance doesn’t sell user data, show ads, charge for subscriptions or push sponsored recommendations at present.
The concept of a try-on app is simple: upload a selfie, pick an outfit, and observe how the outfit would look on you. But Samsung wants to upend the way you shop, and stop you from limiting yourself. To do that, it’s partnered with Glance, an Indian AI company with ambitious goals for redefining the way we use our phones.
Glance doesn’t want you to dig through your home screen and open an app to go clothes shopping. It’s making fashion an integral part of the Galaxy lock screen experience by sharing a wide variety of thoughtfully designed, trendy, and even unconventional looks that you might never have considered without extra inspiration. It can access hundreds of clothing brands, doesn’t shove ads in your face, and doesn’t cost anything to use. So, what’s the catch?
Let Gemini build your wardrobe for you
Better than a trip to the AI mall
Source: Glance
Glance has been poking around the lock screen environment for years. Its lock screen implementation boasts hundreds of millions of users across South Asia, where it began as an AI-tailored news and content delivery service. The company tried to make inroads with a similar integration on Motorola smartphones over a year ago, but it didn’t get much traction.
Things are a little different this time around. Rather than act as a catch-all service for current events, weather, and other features already covered by various widgets, Glance is honing its approach to focus on fashion. Even further, the lock screen implementation is currently available only on Samsung Galaxy devices.
Related
We reached out to the Glance team, who explained how the Gemini-based and Vertex-implemented AI tool works. A Commerce Intelligence Model makes what it deems “hyper-personal recommendations” based on decades of commerce data including trends, cultures, and consumer behavior. A generative Experience model creates a realistic visualization based on parameters including body type, skin tone, style, season, and more to simulate how the clothing looks on a user. Finally, an agentic Transaction Journey Model predicts shopping intent to pair the look with the best-matched products from a huge selection of catalogs.
See also I Tried Gmail, Spark, And Thunderbird, Only To Go Back To This Popular Email App On Android
Glance AI also leverages trending content, local events, and social media moments to make recommendations fresh, relevant, and engaging. High-speed inferencing helps deliver options such as flash sales and trend-driven commerce, making every shopping experience unique and effortless. — Glance
The app is readily available to Galaxy users on the Play Store. In fact, since it soft-launched weeks ago, Glance AI already claims 1.5 million active users, with half of them returning to the app weekly for inspiration. It’s still early, but initial metrics indicate it’s been pretty good at engaging users so far.
What it looks like to use the Glance app.
According to a Glance spokesperson, “Currently the app is free to use. There are no ads, sponsored recommendations or subscriptions at present.” While it’s free for now, there’s no guarantee it always will be, but Indian telecoms giant Jio did invest $200 million specifically to expand Glance outside the Asian subcontinent.
That’s a good start, considering how, at first glance, a cynical user might view this as a thinly veiled (and artificial) advertisement vector. That’s a realistic concern, too, as the recent Glance integration with Motorola phones would periodically nag users to re-enable the lock screen feature if turned off.
It seems as though Glance has tried its hand at a few techniques for getting into the US market. Ideally, it’s learned from the various attempts, and can deliver a user-friendly service that adds value to phones, without getting in the way or spamming users with marketing. Assuming people continue to engage with and buy via the platform, it could be a stepping stone towards the Glance company reaching its lofty goals of revolutionizing how we interact with phones and their most accessible features.
