A woman at a Whole Foods store in San Mateo, California, is seen using a smart shopping cart called a Dash Cart, which was launched by Amazon on February 25, 2024. This smart cart allows customers to scan products directly into their cart as they shop, eliminating the need to wait in line at the checkout.
Amazon announced that it will start selling its smart grocery carts to other retailers as part of its efforts to offer its Dash Cart technology as a service. Currently, Price Chopper and McKeever’s Market stores in Kansas and Missouri are testing these smart grocery carts.
The Dash Cart was initially introduced in 2020 at Amazon’s Fresh supermarket chain before being added to select Whole Foods stores. The cart uses computer vision and sensors to identify items that are placed in bags inside the cart, updating the total price in real time as items are added or removed.
Similarly to its “Just Walk Out” cashier-less technology, Amazon is now expanding the use of Dash Carts to other retailers after selling the Just Walk Out system to third-party businesses in airports, stadiums, and hospitals.
Despite recent layoffs affecting the teams working on these technologies, Amazon remains confident that Just Walk Out and Dash Cart technologies will play a significant role in the future of convenience shopping.
Reports about human moderators monitoring customers using the Just Walk Out technology have been denied by Amazon, stating that human workers are involved in labeling and annotating shopping data to enhance the accuracy of the AI system.
Amazon has started selling its smart grocery carts to other retailers after successfully launching them in select Whole Foods and Fresh stores. The Dash Carts use computer vision and sensors to identify items as customers shop, allowing them to skip the checkout line. Amazon is also expanding its Just Walk Out technology, which enables cashier-less shopping, to more locations. However, there have been reports of human moderators being used to review transactions and label footage to train the AI models that power these technologies. Amazon denies claims that workers watch customers live while shopping, stating that human reviewers are only responsible for labeling and annotating shopping data.
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