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I know this discusses a few strategic plays Amazon is making but shortfalls of the self-checkout project (AmazonGo) are interesting: "In its video touting Amaz
by thedarkginger 10y ago
I know this discusses a few strategic plays Amazon is making but shortfalls of the self-checkout project (AmazonGo) are interesting:
"In its video touting Amazon Go, the company said it was aiming to open the site to the public in “early 2017,” and it hasn’t provided an update to that timing. But the technology has been crashing in tests when the store gets too crowded and requires human quality control, people watching video images to make sure customers are charged for the right things, according to a person familiar with the plan."
Not super familiar with image recognition but do you think that's just a failure of the training data set or a much more complex technical problem?
- gwern 10y agoWhen the demo was released, people had a lot of questions about how the cameras would deal with occlusions and products being covered up by bodies and odd angles. Recognizing and localizing and tracking a single person picking up individual items slowly is a much easier task than tracking many people in a crowd crisscrossing and blocking the camera constantly; that it is apparently failing in exactly the scaled up realistic scenarios where you would predict increased failures points to it being a genuine difficulty and not simply too few crowded scenes in the training set. (I bet their deep learning team is having a lot of fun trying to figure out how to make RNNs rather than CNNs scale and train well...)
- strebler 10y agoI had the same question about cameras dealing with those issues, but this article says "Products are embedded with tracking devices that pair with customers’ phones to charge their accounts". It sounds like this means every product has an RFID / other tag, rather than using computer vision.
- trome 10y agoSure, but who'd actually trust Amazon with their food? I know I wouldn't, they've screwed up 3 out of 5 orders in the past year, leading me to have little faith that they won't give me E Coli covered veggies. They're opening a large, car centric Amazon Grocery pickup location just over in Ballard as a test, but the particular location they picked is a parking lot for 3 to 4 hours a day, and is over 3 blocks from transit (and where they will be putting the light rail in) due to Safeway & Walgreens already owning that prime real estate.
- bogomipz 10y agoCan you say what happens when they screw up the order? Is it your responsibility to wait around for someone to come collect the wrong parts of the order?
- trome 10y agoDepends, twice I've had to ship it back, and once Amazon told me there were no returns and refunded me (Samsung Evo+ 64GB that only did 6MB/s, rated at minimum 10MB/s). That being said, I need to throw that MicroSD card away, whenever I use it in a camera or single board computer instead of a tested Evo, it causes poor performance.
- bogomipz 10y agoOh I was asking about the food ordering specifically. I was curious how errors are resolved with perishable items.
- bearcobra 10y agoI've ordered groceries with Prime Now a few times and never once was worried about trust. I'd probably trust their produce more as the people who have also touched it aren't random shoppers.
- trome 10y ago