What’s Up With the “Shazam” App for Cars? What Auto Service Advisors Need to Know

Since the early days of the iPhone, the “Shazam” mobile app has allowed many millions of people to identify songs playing near them. Using the phone’s microphone, the app listens to the song that is playing, checks the data against its database, and produces the title of the song, the artist who performs it, and other relevant information that users might want.

Now, there’s an app that can do this for cars, too. Take a phone, install the Blippar app, and you can then use your phone’s camera to learn all about the cars in front of you. Pretty neat, right?

Here’s a bit more information that auto service advisors might want to know.

Auto Service Advisors Might Be Impressed with What the App Knows About Cars

The basic idea behind Blippar’s car recognition feature is that it can tell users the make and model of a car, but the information it produces is actually much more detailed and interesting. The specific production year of the car is also identified, along with information about the car’s customer rating and price, and even an augmented reality preview of what the car’s interior looks like, right there on the screen.

There are many practical utilities for this function—even, potentially, for a professional auto service advisor. When a car arrives on the lot and the owner isn’t sure about what specific year it is from, what could be simpler than simply pulling out a smartphone and immediately learning a whole bunch of valuable information?

Auto Service Advisors Ought to Know the App Is 97.7% Accurate at Identifying Some Cars

The Blippar app is incredibly capable and useful most of the time. For cars that it can identify, the makers claim it has a 97.7 per cent success rate in getting the right vehicle. Unfortunately, its functionality is limited to cars that were produced from 2000 onwards.

While this is a bit of a limitation, in terms of real-world usage, it’s likely not one that matters in most cases. Cars produced before 2000 that are still in active use are few and far between, and will mostly be classics or expensive sports cars that owners will take pride in knowing all about. And for those working in an automotive service advisor career, the Blippar app is likely only to be a convenience or a novelty, and not the main tool used for identifying cars.

The Blippar App Is a Great Example of a Potential Future for the Automotive Industry

Currently, the three most important features of the Blippar app are that it is effective, that it is inexpensive, and that it is highly portable. With visual search and augmented reality becoming more important in the tech space, it’s likely that this concept could be applied to all kinds of other information that auto service professionals might find interesting.

In the future, this kind of technology might even be applied to specific components. See something, look at it with your phone’s camera, and instantly learn a lot more about it—perhaps ratings, tips and tricks from other users who have encountered that piece themselves, or other useful information. In an industry such as the automotive industry, there is a lot of potential for visual recognition and augmented reality to bring a lot of value to the space. Some very exciting, perhaps industry-changing developments in this area might only be a few years away!

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