SnapShelf AI app gives you recommendations based on your bookshelves

Snapshot is an exciting new app for book lovers, that provides personalised recommendations based on the books in your bookshelves. The starting point of the app is an image of a bookshelf.

The AI capabilities of the app are on two fronts. The first is optical character recognition on the photos to generate the list of titles, and the second is the recommendations based on the titles. Without a sign-in, users can create a single bookshelf and get personalised reccomendations based on that bookshelf. Multiple photographs can be used on the single bookshelf. Users who opt to sign-in can save their bookshelves under different names, upload different sets of photos, and get more personalised recommendations.

How to add books to the app

There are multiple ways to add books to the app. Users can capture images through the camera button within the app. Users can also load images from their galleries into the app. For the privacy conscious, SnapShelf also allows you to add titles one by one. A Google Search is conducted based on the input, and books identified. A more convenient way is to provide the books as a list. These lists can be copy-pasted into the app. The app does a pretty good job of recognising books even if the titles are provided without the names of the authors. Once the books have been added, the app provides the recommendations.

How good is SnapShelf?

There are no problems with recognising the books. The app only provides a limited set of titles, irrespective of the number of books that you add. We found that the app latched on to a few topics or titles, showing us too many books on warfare based on a diverse collection of titles. When we focused on only a few titles though, SnapShelf did a great job at providing relevant recommendations. Although SnapShelf itself claims that the recommendations are better with longer lists of books, we found the opposite to be true.