Image: Amazon
The company said its palm recognition service, which is available in the US, has been used in store more than 8m times.
Amazon is making it easier for people to sign up for its palm recognition service by launching an app that allows for the process to be completed anywhere with a smartphone.
In an announcement yesterday (28 March), the e-commerce giant said that it has introduced a new app called Amazon One that eliminates the need to sign up to the palm recognition service in stores – which means faster queues and a more seamless shopping experience. This service is currently only available in the US.
“Amazon One was developed using generative AI to create synthetic palm images, which were critical in training our machine learning models,” the company wrote.
“AI also powers our latest innovation – the ability to match a camera phone photo with near-infrared imagery from an Amazon One device – while still maintaining a highly accurate and secure service.”
This means that when a user who signed up for the service via the app – available on the App Store and Google Play – hovers their palm over an Amazon One device for the first time, the AI system can “compare and match” the palm and vein imagery captured with their camera phone photo – completing the enrolment process.
Just this week, Amazon pumped $2.75bn into AI start-up Anthropic to complete a $4bn investment commitment it made last year.
As part of the deal struck in September, Anthropic has been using AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train and deploy its future foundation models. The two will also work together on improving the chips in the future.
The company said Amazon One looks at both the palm and its underlying vein structure to create what it calls a “unique numerical, vector representation” – a palm signature of sorts – for identity matching.
“To ensure Amazon One continues to deliver the same accuracy [more than 99pc], our new AI innovation compares vector representations of palm images from the Amazon One app with the vector representation of palm and vein images from an Amazon One device,” the company went on.
“This allows us to confirm that the person hovering their palm over the Amazon One device is the same who signed up for the service using the app.”
Amazon said that its in-store palm recognition service has been used more than 8m times and that more than eight out of 10 users who use it, use it repeatedly.
But what about data privacy? Amazon said that palm images taken via the app are encrypted and sent to a secure Amazon One domain in the Amazon Web Services cloud. The images on the app – which comes with ‘spoof’ detection – also cannot be downloaded to one’s phone.
The use of biometric identification is not without its controversies. Earlier this week, Sam Altman’s Worldcoin was temporarily banned by Portugal’s data regulator due to privacy concerns. The AI start-up aims to create digital identification for people by scanning their eyes. The data authority said the company provides insufficient information to users regarding their data and raised concerns about the lack of a mechanism to verify the age of users.
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