Amazon's Artificial Intelligence Helped TV Viewers Identify Royal Wedding Guests
Motley FoolMay 20, 2018
Prince Harry and American actress Meghan Markle tied the knot at Windsor Castle on Saturday during a ceremony that began at noon, London time, which was 7 a.m. EDT across the pond and 4 a.m. on the West Coast.
While many of us in the U.S. slept or started our days in other ways, millions of our fellow citizens and hundreds of millions around the world tuned in to the extensive TV coverage of the royal wedding. Those watching via British broadcaster Sky News' livestream didn't have to rack their brains to identify famous wedding guests, thanks to Amazon.com's (NASDAQ: AMZN) artificial intelligence (AI).
Here's what you should know.
Who's that royal?
Who's that guy walking behind George Clooney? Who's that woman whose spaceship-sized hat could inspire War of the Worlds II?
These are the type of questions that were answered by Sky News' "Who's Who Live" function, built by a collaboration between the U.K. broadcaster, Amazon Web Services, and AWS partners GrayMeta and UI Centric. As the 600 guests entered St. George's Chapel at Windsor Castle, the livestream function used Amazon Rekognition to identify notable attendees, such as royals and celebrities, via on-screen captions. It also displayed data to let viewers know a little about the highlighted guests and how they are connected to the royal couple.
Amazon Rekognition is a cloud-based technology that uses AI to recognize and analyze faces (that woman is in her 30s and is deep in thought), and recognize objects, scenes (that's a beach), and activities (that's a boy riding a bike) in images and video. Specifically, the tech uses a type of AI called deep learning, which aims to mimic in machines how humans make inferences from data. Rekognition Image launched in late 2016, followed by Rekognition Video a year later, so these are relatively new offerings within AWS's robust and fast-growing portfolio of cloud services.
This AI technology has many current and potential applications spanning realms from media and entertainment to law enforcement and security. In the political sphere, C-SPAN uses the tech to tag people speaking on camera; it could also be used to identify politicians as they scuttle around at big events such as national conventions. The City of Orlando, Florida, is piloting the use of Rekognition Video and a related AWS tech in its law enforcement efforts, according to Amazon's website.
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