Amazon empowers its AWS with AI capabilities

Amazon has decided to beef up its Amazon Web Services with Artificial Intelligence capabilities that it has developed in-house over the years. At its re:Invent developer event in Las Vegas, the company announced a string of new, intelligent products including Rekognition, Polly and Lex, that can now be deployed by its AWS customers.

The first of these new services under the Amazon AI umbrella is an image recognition service called “Rekognition” that lets you recognise objects and scenes, similar to services already available from Google, Microsoft and others. Amazon says that the tool can be used for real-time analysis, and is so powerful that it can take millions of images in batch form.

“Powered by deep learning and built by our Computer Vision team over the course of many years, this fully-managed service already analyses billions of images daily. It has been trained on thousands of objects and scenes and is now available for you to use in your own applications. You can use the Rekognition Demos to put the service through its paces before dive in and start writing code that uses the Rekognition API,” said the company in an official blog post.

The second is Amazon Polly, a text-to-speech service that uses machine learning to produce life-like speech. “Polly was designed to address many of the more challenging aspects of speech generation,” Amazon explained. “For example, consider the difference in pronunciation of the word “live” in the phrases ‘I live in Seattle’ and ‘Live from New York.’ Polly knows that this pair of homographs are spelt the same but are pronounced quite differently.”

Notably, Polly features 47 male and female voices and supports 24 languages.

The last service named ‘Lex’ that helps in building conversational applications that can feature multi-step conversations. “You can use Amazon Lex to build chatbots and other types of the web & mobile applications that support engaging, lifelike interactions,” Amazon elaborated. “Your bots can provide information, power your application, streamline work activities, or provide a control mechanism for robots, drones, and toys,” it further added.