Because it can...
the Fire Phone's Firefly app, where you can scan text and have it converted to or from English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.
Sounds like it could be quite useful.
Firefly has also been trained to identify 2,000 famous paintings, for those of you who like to walk around art museums with your mobile in your hand.
Sounds, utterly, utterly, utterly pointless for 99.999% of users. Why do they do this sort of thing? Image recognition may well be quite handy, and that may be what they're trying to demonstrate here, but really it's of no use to the few people who actually own one. I mean, if you're in the National Gallery and want to know what you're looking at try scanning and OCRing the label next to the picture. Or even READING it.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
