Aldi Employs Age Estimation Tech For Alcohol Purchases At Checkout-Free Store

Aldi Employs Age Estimation Tech For Alcohol Purchases At Checkout-Free Store

by Mikelle Leow

“Guess how old I am” is one of the most infuriating icebreakers and often concludes with no winners—but might artificial intelligence beat humans at that game? German-owned grocery chain Aldi is betting its money on the machine at its first contactless concept store in Greenwich, southeast London, where age-estimation technology is being trialed.

The no-checkout outlet runs similar to the “just-walk-out” Amazon Go stores in the US, which are app-assisted and detect products that customers have picked up and exited the locations with, automatically billing them for the purchases. This eliminates the need to go through a cashier line or for human contact altogether.

The new Aldi Shop&Go store, which opened last Tuesday for public tests, will even have a platform to predict shoppers’ ages and verify that they are old enough to get restricted items like alcoholic drinks and cigarettes, according to inews.co.uk. The technology comes from digital identity firm Yoti, which is also in use by the UK’s National Health Service.

The platform relies on a machine-learning algorithm to scan photos of faces for their ages. It’s not to be confused with facial recognition, as the system deletes the images and forgets about them soon after completing the process.

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