Everything About Amazon Go: Is This Really a Change or Just Another Wave?
Nasrullah Patel — December 11, 2016 Follow @Peerbits— December 11, 2016
Going through its Beta testing in Seattle, ‘Amazon Go’ is the first ever convenience store unwrapped by Big boys at Amazon released on December 5, 2016 morning.
As per the video released by the company, the system eliminates the traditional ways of standing in a queue, waiting for the time to get billed.
Looking back you might recall the imaginary world at the time when technology began to advance. Those were the days, when we used to think of shopping to be like, enter the store, pick what you want and leave.
Looks like that with Amazon Go breaking the doors of conventional supermarket wisdom, has invited fear for the traditional retail outlets. Let us first have a look at the technology used in Amazon Go:
The technology used in Amazon Go
Amazon Go uses RFID to discern the items individual grabbed from the shelf, followed by syncing the data with a handheld device; he just needs to login from his smartphone at the time of check in as scope of RFID in smartphones are increases day by day. Once he is done with the shopping, he’ll have to move through the transition area, in order to allow the system to sense the items, and accordingly prepare the bill, subsequently charging his Amazon account.
Loaded with an impeccable amalgamation of Artificial Intelligence and computer vision, the convenience store seems to nail all the expectations together.
Lots and lots of cameras and microphones
“Just walk Out” name sounds really easy and attractive, but behind the curtain it keeps lots of ‘lot’ with it. While the company just talk talked about using computer vision, sensor fusion, algorithms, and deep learning, the patent published in 2015 has a lot more to say.
Looking at the patent it feels like the entire thing primarily revolves around lots and lots of microphones and cameras. The camera to sense the product will also be able to analyze the skin tone of the customer, in order to distinguish between two different people reaching on adjacent shelves.
The massive change
Since decades we have been listening about technology that will allow shoppers to bypass the checkout. The theories now finally look to be true, and saying that the Amazon Go technology is difficult to scale, will be nowhere wrong.
With wave-and-pay systems, self-scanning and checkout, and other devices to assist in-store activities through phone, already been introduced, the Amazon guys have indeed come with something beyond comparison. Though as of now, it is open only for the employees, but once the testing finishes successfully, it will be present worldwide.
What critics have to say?
While on one hand the ‘Just walk out’ technology is fantasizing the people around, and the video is going viral for all the good reasons, the critics have something else to say. Critics find the technology breaching the customer’s personal information and the one to be costly. According to a research done by RSR (published in Forbes), 50% retailers with a revenue of over $ 1Billion find the mobile technology going way too faster and might prove to be difficult to equal.
Conclusion
Taking the ‘futuristic video’, technology used in making, and the critics’ verdict altogether, let us for now believe this to be the shopping experience we probably can have in near future. Anyway the general people across the globe will get the opportunity to relish (upon being successful) after it works fine with Amazon employees in Seattle. However, as of now with its initial testing in the real world, one thing is for sure that the work of mobile applications, software, and automation are undoubtedly going to make the living standards much better.
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