Amazon's AI Palm Reading Technology Lets You Use Your Hand as Your Wallet
How Amazon Is Using AI-Powered Palm Recognition
No, Amazon hasn’t inexplicably wandered into the pseudo-spiritual field of fortune-telling, but it does want to read your palms. This is a result of Amazon’s new technology, dubbed “Amazon One”, that’s used to identify customers by scanning their palms. In this article, we explore Amazon One, how it works, and its use cases. Keep reading to learn more.
What Is Amazon One?
Amazon One is a new technology from Amazon that allows customers to leave their wallets at home and use their palms instead. Through AI-driven palm recognition technology, customers can scan their hand over the Amazon One verification device, which resembles a credit card machine with a camera at the top–or a less ominous HAL 9000, depending on how you look at it. The Amazon One device is then able to draw data on the scanned palm, verifying customer age and connecting them with their chosen payment method to complete their payment.
The Amazon One technology has already been rolled out across over 500 Whole Foods Market locations and several additional third-party retailers like sports venues and convenience stores. Crucially, in their explainer video, we’re told by Gerard Medioni, vice president of Amazon’s Just Walk Out, that their systems don’t actually know who customers are when their palm is read. As a result, it’s likely that Amazon One employs a form of advanced encryption technology that’s capable of connecting the payment system to customer accounts while masking their personal information.
How Does Amazon’s AI Palm Reading Tech Work?
Although Amazon One is based on generative AI technology, similar to popular models like ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, it does not generate text-based responses to user inputs. Instead, generative AI was used to create thousands of images of palms to use as the dataset to train the Amazon One algorithm. In other words, Amazon leveraged artificial intelligence to train artificial intelligence.
So, why did Amazon choose to use artificially generated images of palms and wrists rather than real images? Using AI images meant that the team behind Amazon One could create a vast, varied, and diverse dataset of images that considered different skin colors, deformities, and hand sizes, as well as changes in lighting, hand position, and even band-aids. This has led to Amazon One’s palm recognition being 100 times more accurate at identifying a person than two irises–a biometric typically used for the unique identification of an individual.
As mentioned previously, Amazon One doesn’t know the identity of customers; instead, it simply uses a person's palm to connect them with a payment instrument. However, in order to protect customer privacy, Amazon One goes one step further by functioning beyond the normal light spectrum, meaning it’s able to identify a palm without perceiving gender or skin tone.
Applications of Amazon One and Palm Reading Tech
While Amazon One has several intended applications, as listed below, it is still a new technology and many more use cases may arise in time.
Payments: The primary function of Amazon One is to allow customers to conveniently pay for their shopping by simply scanning their hands, removing the need to carry wallets. Not only does this add convenience to the shopping experience, it also improves customer safety by making it impossible for credit cards to be lost or stolen.
Loyalty Cards: Amazon One is capable of connecting palms with store loyalty cards, meaning customers theoretically could pay and activate their loyalty card perks in one swipe of their palm. This is good news for customers who regularly forget their in-store loyalty cards, as through Amazon One they’ll always carry it with them.
Digital Tickets: Similarly to loyalty cards, Amazon One can also be used for digital tickets. For example, at music concerts, instead of having to download tickets on their phones or order physical copies, concert-goers can swipe their palm and verify their ticket purchase.
Age Verification: Palm recognition technology can even be used to verify an individual’s age when paying for alcohol and other restricted items. This could mean customers no longer need to show ID at checkout, as their age can be verified upon payment.
Is Biometric Verification the Future?
The biometric market is expected to grow to over $136 billion by 2031, which is as good an indicator as any that biometric verification is going to be highly common in the near future. With artificial intelligence growing in capability and, in turn, unfortunately, causing an increase in AI-driven scams that can almost perfectly replicate a person’s identity, biometric verification will likely become a primary weapon against fraud. In fact, we discussed the possibility of the proliferation of biometric technology in a previous article about Worldcoin ID.
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