I’d been preparing for Thanksgiving a good 3 weeks in advance. One reason is that I’d recently rented out a new apartment and the troops were heading over to my place this year. I obviously had to make sure everything went well and for that, trust me, there was no resting even for a minute!
Thanksgiving is really about being thankful for the people and things in your life and spending quality time with family. This Thanksgiving I’m especially grateful to Amazon for making it the best experience ever! Read on to find out how Amazon made things awesome!
Good times started two weeks ago when I was at the AmazonGo store with my friend, Sue.
In fact, this was the first time I had set foot in one of the stores. I wanted to see what was so cool about them and why everyone had been talking about them for so long! The store was pretty big and lived up to the A to Z concept, as far as I could see. The only odd thing was that I didn’t notice any queues or a billing counter. Sue glided around the floor with ease, as if she did this every day. I was more interested in seeing what was so special about this place. After she got her stuff, she headed straight for the door. I smiled to myself thinking how absent minded she was. So I called her back and reminded her “You haven’t gotten your products billed.” She smiled back at me and shrugged, “I don’t need to.” Before I could open my mouth to tell her off for stealing, she explained to me about the store. It’s something totally futuristic! Have you ever imagined not having to stand in a line to buy groceries? At the store, you just had to log in to your AmazonGo app on your phone, enter the store, grab your stuff and then leave. The sensors installed everywhere in the store automatically detected what you’d picked up and would bill you accordingly. They also used Computer Vision and Deep Learning to track people and their shopping carts. Now that’s something! And you even got a receipt!
Well, it was my birthday last week and knowing what an avid reader I was, my colleagues from office gifted me a brand new Kindle. I loved every bit of it, but the best part was the X-ray feature. With X-ray, you could simply get information about a character, person or terms in a book. You could also scroll through the long lists of excerpts and click on one to go directly to that particular portion of the book! That’s really amazing, especially if you want to read a particular part of the book quickly. It came in use at the right time – I downloaded a load of recipe books for the turkey. Another feather in the cap for Amazon!
Talking about feathers in one’s cap, you won’t believe it, but Amazon actually got me rekognised at work a few days ago. Nah, that wasn’t a typo. I worked as a software developer/ML engineer in a startup and I’d been doing this for as long as I can remember. 
I recently built this cool mobile application that recognized faces and unlocked your phone even when you didn’t have something like Face ID on your phone and the app had gotten us a million downloads in a month! It could also recognize and give you information about the ethnicity of a person if you captured their photograph with the phone’s camera. The trick was that I’d used the AmazonRekognition APIs for enhanced face detection in the application. Rekognition allows you to detect objects, scenes, text, and faces, using highly scalable, deep learning models. I also enhanced the application using the Polly API. Polly converts text to whichever language you want the speech in and gives you the synthesized speech in the form of audio files.The app I built now converted input text into 18 different languages, helping one converse with the person in front of them in that particular language, should they have a problem doing it in English. I got that long awaited promotion right after! Ever wondered how I got the new apartment? 😉
Since the folks were coming over to my place in a few days, I thought I’d get a new dinner set. You’d probably think I would need to sit down at my PC or probably pick up my phone to search for a set online, but I had better things to do. Thanks to Alexa, I simply needed to ask her to find one for me and she did it brilliantly. Now Alexa isn’t my girlfriend, although I would have loved that to be. Alexa is actually Amazon’s cloud-based voice service that provides customers with an engaging way of interacting with technology.
Alexa is blessed with finely tuned ASR or Automatic Speech Recognition and NLU or Natural Language Understanding engines, that instantly recognize and respond to voice requests. I selected a pretty looking set and instantly bought it through my Prime account. With technology like this at my fingertips, the developer in me had left no time in exploring possibilities with Alexa. That’s when I found out about Lex, built on the same deep learning platform that Alexa works on, which allows developers to build conversational interfaces into their apps.
With the dinner set out of the way, I sat back with my feet up on the table. I was awesome, baby! Oh crap! I forgot to buy the turkey, the potatoes, the wine and a whole load of other stuff. It was 3 AM and I started panicking. I remembered that mum always put the turkey in the fridge at least 3 days in advance. I had only 2! I didn’t even have the time to make it to the AmazonGo store. I was panicking again and called up Suzy to ask her if she could pick up the stuff for me. She sounded so calm over the phone when I narrated my horror to her. She simply told me to get the stuff from AmazonFresh. So I hastily disconnected the call and almost screamed to Alexa, “Alexa, find me a big bird!”, and before I realized what I had said, I was presented with this.
So I tried again, this time specifying what I actually needed! With AmazonDash integrating with AmazonFresh, I was able to get the turkey and other groceries delivered home in no time! What a blessing, indeed!
A day before Thanksgiving, I was stuck in the office, working late on a new project. We usually tinkered around with a lot of ML and AI stuff. There was this project which needed the team to come up with a really innovative algorithm to perform a deep learning task. As the project lead, I was responsible for choosing the tech stack and I’m glad a little birdie had recently told me about AWS taking in MXNet officially as a Deep Learning Framework. MXNet made it a breeze to build ML applications that train quickly and could run anywhere. Moreover, with the recent collaboration between Amazon and Microsoft, a new ML library called Gluon was born. Available in MXNet, Gluon made building ML models, even more, easier and quicker, without compromising on performance. Need I say the project was successful?
I got home that evening and sat down to pick a good flick or two to download from Amazon PrimeVideo. There’s always someone in the family who’d suggest we all watch a movie and I had to be prepared. With that done I quickly showered and got to bed. It was going to be a long day the next day!
4 AM my alarm rang and I was up! It was Thanksgiving, and what a wonderful day it was! I quickly got ready and prepared to start cooking. I got the bird out of the freezer and started to thaw it in cold water. It was a big bird so it was going to take some time. In the meantime, I cleaned up the house and then started working on the dressing. Apples, sausages, and cranberry. Yum! As I sliced up the sausages I realized that I had misjudged the quantity. I needed to get a couple more packets immediately! I had to run to the grocery store right away or there would be a disaster! But it took me a few minutes to remember it was Thanksgiving, one of the craziest days to get out on the road. I could call the store delivery guy or probably Amazon Dash, but then that would be illogical cos he’d have to take the same congested roads to get home.
I turned to Alexa for help, “Alexa, how do I get sausages delivered home in the next 30 minutes?”. And there I got my answer – Try Amazon PrimeAir.
Now I don’t know about you, but having a drone deliver a couple packs of sausages to my house, is nothing less than ecstatic! I sat it out near the window for the next 20 minutes, praying that the package wouldn’t be intercepted by some hungry birds! I couldn’t miss the sight of the pork flying towards my apartment.
With the dressing and turkey baked and ready, things were shaping up much better than I had expected. The folks started rolling in by lunchtime. Mum and dad were both quite impressed with the way I had organized things. I was beaming and in my mind hi-fived Amazon for helping me make everything possible with its amazing products and services designed to delight customers. It truly lives up to its slogan: Work hard. Have fun. Make history.
If you are one of those folks who do this every day, behind the scenes, by building amazing products powered by machine learning and big data to make other’s lives better, I want to thank you today for all your hard work. This Thanksgiving weekend, Packt’s offering an unbelievable deal – Buy any book or video for just $10 or any three for $25!
I know what I have my eyes on!
- Python Machine Learning – Second Edition by Sebastian Raschka and Vahid Mirjalili
- Effective Amazon Machine Learning by Alexis Perrier
- OpenCV 3 – Advanced Image Detection and Reconstruction [Video] by Prof. Robert Laganiere
In the end, there’s nothing better than spending quality time with your family, enjoying a sumptuous meal, watching smiles all around and just being thankful for all you have. All I could say was, this Thanksgiving was truly Amazon fulfilled! 🙂
Happy Thanksgiving folks!
