Amazon Fire Phone: The Missing Manual

Chapter 2. Firefly

You’ll learn to:

• Learn what Firefly can and can’t recognize

• Use Firefly to recognize and buy books and music

• Use Firefly to identify and rent or buy movies and TV shows

• Connect with phone numbers, email addresses, and websites by pointing your Fire phone at them

FIREFLY SOMETIMES SEEMS MAGICAL. With this technology, your Fire phone looks at things you point it at—text, posters, artwork, phone numbers, email addresses, and more—and identifies them. Firefly can listen as well, and recognizes music, movies, and TV shows by what it hears. If the item is available from Amazon, Firefly lets you buy it with a tap.

Understanding Firefly

FIREFLY RECOGNIZES SO MANY things that when you first try it you may find yourself pointing it at random objects just to see what it comes up with—like a nearby container of Lysol wipes. Sometimes it recognizes them and other times not. But it’s always entertaining to see what it finds.

When you point Firefly at an object, it does some fancy object-recognition and matching (see the box on How Firefly Works) and compares what it finds to images in Amazon’s product database. If Firefly can’t figure out what you’re pointing it at, try pointing it at a bar code. Firefly can recognize just about anything that way.

When it comes to images, Firefly can do ...