Unstructured data belonging to the enterprise continues to grow, making it a challenge for customers and employees to get the information they need. Amazon Kendra is a highly accurate intelligent search service powered by machine learning (ML). It helps you easily find the content you're looking for, even when it's scattered across multiple locations and content repositories. Amazon Kendra leverages deep learning and reading comprehension to deliver precise answers. It offers natural language search for a user experience that's like interacting with a human expert.

Faire is an online wholesale marketplace built on the belief that the future is local -- there are over 1M independent retailers in the U.S. and Canada doing more than twice the revenue of Walmart and Amazon combined. At Faire, we're using the power of tech, data, and machine learning to connect a thriving community of over 100,000 brands and local retailers around the world. Picture your favorite boutique in town -- we help them discover the best products to sell in their stores. With the right tools and insights, we believe that we can level the playing field so that small businesses can compete with these big box and ecommerce giants. We're looking for smart, resourceful and passionate people to join us as we power the shop local movement.

The voice of Alexa, the virtual assistant developed by Amazon, is provided by Nina Rolle, a Colorado-based voiceover artist, according to a new book. Amazon has never revealed who provides the default female voice that responds to commands and questions given to Alexa, but the author Brad Stone said he identified the voice as Rolle's after "canvasing the professional voiceover community" for his new book, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire. Rolle, who is based in Boulder, has conducted voiceover work for clients including Honda, Jenny Craig and Chase bank. According to Stone's book, she was selected after Amazon spent months assessing various candidates, with the final choice signed off by Jeff Bezos, the company's founder. Stone writes that Rolle said she was unable to talk about the role when he contacted her in February.

Successful businesses not only have great products and services; they also have a deep understanding of their customers. Companies that can use behavioral analytics in marketing automation platforms are better equipped to deliver real-time marketing efforts. According to a research case study from Deloitte, companies with a customer-centric business model are 60% more profitable. Knowing and adapting this differentiating business model is the key to becoming a market leader in today's fierce competitive landscape. With a 3.8 billion user base and 86% of the users interacting daily, social media has become an impactful customer voice through platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit.

In our previous post, we described how to translate documents using the real-time translation API from Amazon Translate and AWS Lambda. However, this method may not work for files that are too large. They may take too much time, triggering the 15-minute timeout limit of Lambda functions. One can use batch API, but this is available only in seven AWS Regions (as of this blog's publication). To enable translation of large files in regions where Batch Translation is not supported, we created the following solution.

Collectors have long enlisted dealers or auction houses to help resell their art holdings because such insiders typically have up-to-date pricing data and access to potential buyers. Now, in the latest challenge to the art world's status quo, a team led by former Sotheby's rainmaker Adam Chinn plans to launch a peer-to-peer digital marketplace later this month that will invite collectors to sell high-end art to each other, directly and anonymously. Listings in an early version of the site, called LiveArt Market, include an Andy Warhol "Rorschach" from 1984 valued around $200,000 and Jack Pierson's 2009 sign, "Glory," valued around $85,000. The move comes as all sorts of art-world players rethink the traditional ways art gets traded online, from former Christie's auctioneer Loïc Gouzer's Fair Warning auction app to the proliferation of digital platforms selling NFT artworks. Even as the art world's attention increasingly pivots back to in-person art events including fairs, online sales of luxury goods remain robust and some top industry dealmakers see a bigger market opportunity in finding fresh ways to sell art to collectors accustomed to shopping for art online.

"We are on a mission to transform the future of grocery retail through sustained technology innovation." Ocado Technology is putting the world's retailers online using advanced artificial intelligence, robotics, big data, the cloud and IoT. We develop the innovative software and hardware systems that power Ocado.com, as well as the unique'Ocado Smart Platform' which is being implemented by ambitious retailers across the world from Europe to America, Asia and beyond. With everything from websites to highly automated warehouses that we design in-house, our employees are skilled specialists with expertise across a wide range of technologies, working on cutting-edge innovations that are shaping the future of our society. We are a fast- growing company: today we have colleagues in 7 development centre across the UK and Europe, with offices open in London, Hatfield, Welwyn Garden City (UK), Krakow, Wroclaw (Poland), Sofia (Bulgaria) and Barcelona (Spain), with a satellite office in Stockholm (Sweden).

When making an online purchase, it becomes important for the customer to read the product reviews carefully and make a decision based on that. However, reviews can be lengthy, may contain repeated, or sometimes irrelevant information that does not help in decision making. In this paper, we introduce MRCBert, a novel unsupervised method to generate summaries from product reviews. We leverage Machine Reading Comprehension, i.e. MRC, approach to extract relevant opinions and generate both rating-wise and aspect-wise summaries from reviews. Through MRCBert we show that we can obtain reasonable performance using existing models and transfer learning, which can be useful for learning under limited or low resource scenarios. We demonstrated our results on reviews of a product from the Electronics category in the Amazon Reviews dataset. Our approach is unsupervised as it does not require any domain-specific dataset, such as the product review dataset, for training or fine-tuning. Instead, we have used SQuAD v1.1 dataset only to fine-tune BERT for the MRC task. Since MRCBert does not require a task-specific dataset, it can be easily adapted and used in other domains.

This is a guest post by Cyrus Wong, an AWS Machine Learning Hero. You can learn more about and connect with AWS Machine Learning Heroes at the community page. On July 29, 2020, AWS announced that Amazon Translate now supports Microsoft Office documents, including .docx, The world is full of bilingual countries and cities like Hong Kong. I find myself always needing to prepare Office documents and presentation slides in both English and Chinese.

The digital culture is turning out to be a shelter hub for most business that carried out their operations traditionally or in ways that are physical. Retailers too are resorting to the powers of digitalization to ensure better returns on investment. If seen amidst the COVID-19 situation, the picture of retailing and retailers is pretty murky and rickety. With every kind of business being adversely affected, retailers too were not ready for the tolls that pandemic would take, which made them suffer from heavy losses. In order to prevent the adversities from repeating themselves, the retailer community is rushing to build their online presence and adapting to a digital transition.