How Amazon's AI-powered store might work its magic

From InfoWorld: Amazon Go sounds like the ultimate retail experience: No checkout lines, no registers. Just walk in, grab what you want, and leave.

But what’s most eye-opening about the retail and cloud giant’s first foray into a brick-and-mortar presence is Amazon's claim that its “Just Walk Out” store is powered by “the same types of technologies used in self-driving cars: computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning.”

The details provided so far are sketchy, but based on what Amazon has revealed—and what’s already state-of-the-art for those technologies—it’s possible to make some educated guesses about what Amazon has put together and how others may benefit from it in time.

There is a promotional video for Amazon Go that depicts the process of shopping in the automated store, the first of which is set to open in Seattle in early 2017.

Customers enter the store and swipe through a turnstile using a smartphone app. Anything taken from the shelves is added to a virtual shopping cart. Put things back, Amazon states, and the items will be automatically removed from the cart. To make a purchase, just leave the store and one’s Amazon account is automatically debited for the items in the virtual shopping cart.

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