Amazon’s new smart cart scans products using AI to eliminate the need to queue at the checkout

Today, July 12, Amazon officially unveiled an updated version of the smart Dash Cart, a special “cart” for shopping at grocery stores that automatically scans all items added by the buyer, while allowing you to pay for everything on one screen. The specialists who created this technology are confident that such trolleys will allow you not to waste time on long queues at the checkout, making purchases much more comfortable and in a more automated format. True, so far such smart carts are more of an experiment than a full-fledged working product that can be used in modern supermarkets and shops.

The fact is that the project is still in development and needs a lot of improvements – now Amazon allows you to take advantage of the new Dash Cart exclusively at the Whole Foods grocery store in Westford, Massachusetts. Yes, the company promised that in the coming months this cart will go to other stores of this franchise in many states of America, but the process may well be delayed. It is worth recalling that the original Dash Cart was introduced by the company back in 2020 – it works in stores of the same Whole Foods grocery chain, and even then Amazon promised to launch development across America in the near future.

The new Dash Cart works exactly like the original, with a whole array of sensors on the chassis that use AI cameras and barcode scanners to identify what a person is loading into or taking out of their cart. Already in 2020, the system worked extremely quickly, almost instantly recognizing products that went to the basket. Also, scales were built into the cart so that the system determines the weight of a particular product (if the price depends on weight, and not on quantity or fixed containers), and the shopping list, the price of each individual product and the total cost are immediately displayed on the touch screen and you can pay.

The updated version of the Dash Cart has received the same functionality, but with two important upgrades. The first is that the trolley has become larger and more capacious, so that it will be possible to load much more goods, although the weight of the basket itself has been reduced. The second upgrade is that now the cart can recognize its location in the store and prompt the user about nearby products.

Source: Trash Box

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