Can AI, ML Help Amazon Make Shopping Simpler and More Natural?

"Machine learning is ubiquitous at Amazon today," said Rajeev Rastogi, Vice President, Machine Learning at Amazon India, in an interview with Gadgets 360. "Within the retail business, we are using machine learning extensively to recommend products to customers, forecast future demand for products, and improve the quality of a product catalogue, both classifying products, and also eliminating duplicate products." One of the most basic examples of how Amazon is using machine learning (ML) is when you misspell a query on its search bar. The e-commerce site, Rastogi noted, looks at the phonetic distance between the typed misspelt query and the correct query instead of looking at their textual distance to provide accurate results -- no matter whether you have spelt something incorrect. For instance, if you type "geezer" on Amazon to look for the available geyser options, the marketplace will autocorrect the spellings and show you relevant results.