Amazon

Amazon, Apple, and Google have been building chatbots for years. So how did they let the alliance between Microsoft and OpenAI integrate the first smash-hit bot into Microsoft products?

Amazon published a series of web pages designed to help people use AI responsibly. Amazon Web Services introduced so-called AI service cards that describe the uses and limitations of some models it serves.

Too exhausted (or unimaginative) to tell your child a bedtime story? Amazon’s smart displays can spin bespoke tales on demand. A feature called Create with Alexa generates children’s stories complete with illustrations, music, and sound effects on the Amazon Echo Show device.

A wearable device may help warehouse workers avoid injuries. Modjoul, maker of a system that evaluates risks to people engaged in physical labor, received an undisclosed sum from Amazon as part of a $1 billion investment in technologies that might enhance the retailer giant’s operations.

A neural network may help an online music service to spot songs with the potential to go big. Musiio uses AI to identify specific attributes and qualities in recorded music. Online audio distributor SoundCloud purchased the Singapore-based startup.

Amazon’s first brick-and-mortar clothing store is getting ready to deliver automated outfit recommendations. The ecommerce giant announced plans to open a flagship Amazon Style location at a Los Angeles-area mall this year.

Some of the world’s largest corporations will use standardized criteria to evaluate AI systems that influence hiring and other personnel decisions.

Machine learning changes fast. Take natural language processing. Word2vec, introduced in 2013, quickly replaced one-hot encoding with word embeddings. Transformers revolutionized the field in 2017 by parallelizing the previously sequential training process.

Amazon reported long-term success using machine learning to shrink its environmental footprint. The online retailer developed a system that fuses product descriptions, images, and structured data to decide how an item should be packed for shipping.

An Android app offers speech recognition model for speech impaired by cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, Parkinson’s disease, stroke, or traumatic brain injury.

Recommendations from the National Security Commission on AI were enshrined in over 190 laws in 2021.

Facebook disabled face recognition for uploaded photos and videos as well as its retrospective Memories service and promised to delete over 1 billion individual face recognition templates.

Amazon unveiled a robot that patrols users’ homes, scopes out strangers, and warns of perceived dangers.

Some delivery drivers fired by Amazon contend that the retailer’s automated management system played an unfair role in terminating their employment. Drivers in Amazon Flex, an Uber-like program that enables independent drivers to earn money delivering the company’s packages.

Shoppers at Amazon’s newest grocery store can skip the checkout line. Amazon opened its first full-scale supermarket that monitors which items customers place in their cart and charges them automatically when they leave. It calls the system Just Walk Out.