When you deploy intelligent search in your organization, two important factors to consider are access to the latest and most comprehensive information, and a contextual discovery mechanism. Many companies are still struggling to make their internal documents searchable in a way that allows employees to get relevant information knowledge in a scalable, cost-effective manner. A 2018 International Data Corporation (IDC) study found that data professionals are losing 50% of their time every week--30% searching for, governing, and preparing data, plus 20% duplicating work. Amazon Kendra is purpose-built for addressing these challenges. Amazon Kendra is an intelligent search service that uses deep learning and reading comprehension to deliver more accurate search results.

In 2017, we launched Amazon Transcribe, an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy to add speech-to-text capabilities to any application. Today, I'm very happy to announce the availability of Amazon Transcribe Call Analytics, a new feature that lets you easily extract valuable insights from customer conversations with a single API call. Each discussion with potential or existing customers is an opportunity to learn about their needs and expectations. For example, it's important for customer service teams to figure out the main reasons why customers are calling them, and measure customer satisfaction during these calls. Likewise, salespeople try to gauge customer interest, and their reaction to a particular sales pitch.

Cognitive retail is the future that's driving retail stores both online and offline establishments. Despite the steep learning curve involved by all the stakeholders in terms of implementations, it's the prospect of diverse benefits that is luring retail stores towards cognitive computing. In this new retail world, the cognitive consumer expects great services at all times. Brands must deliver on such expectations. Cognitive retail affects almost every aspect of a retail business from marketing to supply chain to IT, e-commerce and merchandising.

If you're wondering which company makes the best streaming players for the least amount of money, you might not expect the answer to be Walmart. Walmart's $25 Onn FHD Streaming Stick and $30 UHD Streaming Device both undercut the cheapest comparable Roku and Fire TV streamers, yet the hardware doesn't seem compromised despite the low price. Meanwhile, Google's Android TV software provides a slick streaming menu, powerful voice search, and the ability to cast video from your phone. They don't support Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos, or HDR10, and I had trouble getting TV volume and power controls to work on the cheaper FHD Streaming Stick. But if that doesn't happen to you, and your streaming needs aren't overly demanding, Walmart's devices are surprisingly hard to beat.

Launched at AWS re:Invent 2020, Amazon SageMaker Pipelines is the first purpose-built, easy-to-use continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) service for machine learning (ML). With Pipelines, you can create, automate, and manage end-to-end ML workflows at scale. You can extend your pipelines to include steps for tasks performed outside of Amazon SageMaker by taking advantage of custom callback steps. This feature lets you include tasks that are performed using other AWS services, third parties, or tasks run outside AWS. Before the launch of this feature, steps within a pipeline were limited to the supported native SageMaker steps.

It's a great feeling to see our retailers reopen nationwide. As customers, we have waited to walk into our favorite stores, eagerly finding new merchandise and admiring new floor layouts. At the same time, retailers are keen to understand how customers interact inside their physical stores. Tech innovations, especially powered by AI, can reveal insights about customers that retailers may not see in plain sight. Today, I'm excited to focus on spatial intelligence -- technology that measures how people and objects move and interact in a given space.

All the sessions from Transform 2021 are available on-demand now. As part of VentureBeat's series of interviews with women and BIPOC leaders in the AI industry, we sat down with Dr. Katia Walsh, chief strategy and artificial intelligence officer, Levi Strauss & Co. In her career she has forged paths for people from every intersection of race, culture, class, and education, giving them the tools they need in an AI- and data-centric world to be creative, solve problems, develop new solutions, and change the game in their roles across their companies. VB: Could you tell us about your background, and your current role at your company? I started my career as a journalist in communist Bulgaria, where I personally experienced the power of information through a story I wrote while still in high school.

Voice Assistant Technology had a market of its own even before the pandemic hit. Covid-19 and the fear that comes with it have just acted as a catalyst in the adaptation process and radically reshaped consumers' choices. If we go back to 2019, we see that home and voice-connected devices were moving towards becoming consumers' commerce command focus. The trend revolves around millennials who own six devices run on voice assistants except for their phones, and over 31% seem to have made purchases using these devices. With these numbers, we can deduce that the world was already moving towards a more Voice technology and AI-led market before'Global Pandemic' shook our lives.

Artificial Intelligence-powered product recommendations and a more scientific approach to data has seen IKEA lift average order value (AOV) by 2% worldwide. Here Albert Bertlisson, head of engineering at Edge at IKEA Retail (Ingka Group) explains how the company did it. "At IKEA we have multiple places in our customer journey in various channels where different kinds of personalisation can deliver a superior customer experience," he says. "After a while in the broader'recommendations' team there was a decision to split the team to have one sub-team focused on product recommendations. The pandemic altered customer behaviour and needs as well. At that inflection point we decided to change our way of working and dive head-first into a more scientific approach to handle the operational complexities of delivering high quality product recommendations at scale. We deemed this necessary to improve our level of personalization and to have a holistic understanding of our customers."

In 1937, two decades after founding his first Piggly Wiggly, supermarket entrepreneur Clarence Saunders opened Keedoozle, a "fully-automated grocery store." Groceries were offered at a steep discount and sample items were displayed in glass cabinets. "To purchase, the customer will insert a key in a hole in the showcase beside the sample article, press a button," TIME Magazine reported at the time. "In the stockroom the proper article will drop on a conveyor belt leading to the cashier's desk. Simultaneously the purchase price is recorded on an adding machine. After all purchases are made, the customer sticks his key into the adding machine, gets his bill. Using another key, the cashier releases the purchases all wrapped for the customer."