Amazon’s AI ‘Rekognition’ Technology Identified Royal Wedding Celebrity Guests

Amazon helped viewers of this weekend’s royal wedding identify celebrity guests using artificial intelligence (AI).

According to The Motley Fool, those watching the wedding via U.K. broadcaster Sky News’ livestream were able to use a “Who’s Who Live” function, a collaboration between Sky News, Amazon Web Services and AWS partners GrayMeta and UI Centric.

As guests arrived at St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, the function identified royals and other notable guests through on-screen captions, interesting information about each celebrity and how they are connected to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.

The function was made possible by Amazon Rekognition, a cloud-based technology that uses AI to recognize and analyze faces, as well as objects, scenes and activities in images and video. And Sky News isn’t the first to use it: C-SPAN utilizes Rekognition to tag people speaking on camera.

In addition, the city of Orlando, Florida is piloting the use of Rekognition Video and a related AWS tech in its law enforcement efforts.

Rekognition is a fairly new offering for AWS; Rekognition Image launched in late 2016, followed by Rekognition Video a year later.

Late last year, Amazon announced a number of new machine learning features for AWS in an effort to get ahead in the AI race. The new features will make it possible for AWS customers to develop and train custom AI algorithms. Applications of this ability could include real-time translation, video analysis and text scanning to identify keywords and ideas.

Currently, Amazon is the biggest cloud-computing service provider, with an estimated market share of 33 percent in the first quarter – more than twice the 13 percent share held by its biggest competitor, Microsoft.

And in the first quarter, the revenue of AWS increased 48 percent year over year on a constant-currency basis. While it accounted for just 11 percent of Amazon’s total revenue, it also made up 73 percent of total operating income.