Amazon Lex, the technology that powers Amazon Alexa, enables any
developer to build rich, conversational user experiences for web,
mobile, and connected device apps; preview starts today
Amazon Polly transforms text into lifelike speech, enabling apps
to talk with 47 lifelike voices in 24 languages
Amazon Rekognition makes it easy to add image analysis to
applications, using powerful deep learning-based image and face
recognition
Capital One, Motorola Solutions, SmugMug, American Heart
Association, NASA, HubSpot, Redfin, Ohio Health, DuoLingo, Royal
National Institute of Blind People, LingApps, GoAnimate, and
Coursera are among the many customers using these Amazon AI
Services
Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an
Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced three Artificial
Intelligence (AI) services that make it easy for any developer to
build apps that can understand natural language, turn text into
lifelike speech, have conversations using voice or text, analyze
images, and recognize faces, objects, and scenes. Amazon Lex,
Amazon Polly, and Amazon Rekognition are based on the same proven,
highly scalable Amazon technology built by the thousands of deep
learning and machine learning experts across the company. Amazon AI
services all provide high-quality, high-accuracy AI capabilities
that are scalable and cost-effective. Amazon AI services are fully
managed services so there are no deep learning algorithms to build,
no machine learning models to train, and no up-front commitments or
infrastructure investments required. This frees developers to focus
on defining and building an entirely new generation of apps that
can see, hear, speak, understand, and interact with the world
around them. To learn more about Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly, or
Amazon Rekognition, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/amazon-ai
Until now, very few developers have been able to build, deploy,
and broadly scale apps with AI capabilities because doing so
required access to vast amounts of data, and specialized expertise
in machine learning and neural networks. Effectively applying AI
involves extensive manual effort to develop and tune many different
types of machine learning and deep learning algorithms (e.g.
automatic speech recognition, natural language understanding, image
classification), collect and clean the training data, and train and
tune the machine learning models. And this process must be repeated
for every object, face, voice, and language feature in an
application. Amazon AI services eliminate all of this heavy
lifting, making AI broadly accessible to all app developers by
offering Amazon’s powerful and proven deep learning algorithms and
technologies as fully managed services that any developer can
access through an API call or a few clicks in the AWS Management
Console. Amazon AI services make the full power of Amazon’s natural
language understanding, speech recognition, text-to-speech, and
image analysis technologies available at any scale, for any app, on
any device, anywhere.
“The combination of better algorithms and broad access to
massive amounts of data and cost-effective computing power provided
by the cloud is making AI a reality for application developers. AWS
is home to some of the most innovative and creative AI applications
in use today,” said Raju Gulabani, VP, Databases, Analytics, and
AI, AWS. “Thousands of machine learning and deep learning experts
across Amazon have been developing AI technologies for years to
predict what customers might like to read, to drive efficiencies in
our fulfillment centers through robotics and computer vision
technologies, and to give customers our AI-powered virtual
assistant, Alexa. Now, we are making the technology underlying
these innovations available to any developer in the form of three
fully managed Amazon AI services that are easy to use, powerful,
and cost effective. We are excited to see how customers use Amazon
Lex, Amazon Polly, and Amazon Rekognition to build a new generation
of apps that have human-like intelligence and can see, hear, speak,
and interact with people and their environments.”
Intelligent conversations with Amazon Lex
Amazon Lex is a new service for building conversational
interfaces using voice and text that is built on the same automatic
speech recognition (ASR) technology and natural language
understanding (NLU) that powers Amazon Alexa. Amazon Lex makes it
easy to bring sophisticated, natural language capabilities to
virtually any app. Developers can build and test bots
(conversational apps that perform automated tasks like checking the
weather or booking flights) directly from the AWS Management
Console by typing in a few sample phrases (e.g., “find a flight,”
or “book a flight”) along with instructions for getting the
required parameters to complete task (e.g., travel date and
destination) and the corresponding clarifying questions to ask the
user (e.g., “when do you want to travel?” and “where do you want to
go?”). Amazon Lex takes care of the rest, building the language
model and asking the follow-up questions needed to complete the
task. Because Amazon Lex is integrated with AWS Lambda, developers
can configure Amazon Lex to invoke the appropriate backend service
(e.g., the flight booking service) through an AWS Lambda function.
Developers can also use pre-built enterprise connectors that
execute AWS Lambda functions to answer questions like “what are my
top 10 accounts in Salesforce.com,” by fetching data from
enterprise systems like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Marketo,
Zendesk, QuickBooks and HubSpot.
Bots built using Amazon Lex can be used anywhere: from web
applications, to chat and messenger apps like Slack and Facebook
Messenger, or through voice in apps on mobile or connected devices.
Amazon Lex handles the authentication required by different
platforms and simplifies the user interface design by not requiring
developers to write custom code for each platform. Moreover,
developers do not have to worry about scaling their infrastructure
as Amazon Lex scales automatically as traffic to a bot increases,
and developers pay only for the calls made to the Amazon Lex
API.
Capital One offers a broad spectrum of financial products and
services to consumers, small businesses, and commercial clients
through a variety of channels. “As a heavy user of AWS, Amazon
Lex’s seamless integration with other AWS services like AWS Lambda
and Amazon DynamoDB is really appealing,” said Firoze Lafeer, Chief
Technology Officer, Capital One Labs, Capital One. “A highly
scalable solution, Amazon Lex also offers potential to speed time
to market for a new generation of voice and text interactions, such
as our recently launched Capital One skill for Alexa.”
OhioHealth is a nationally recognized healthcare organization
with a network of 11+ hospitals in 47 counties. “We are excited
about utilizing evolving speech recognition and natural language
processing technology to enhance the lives of our customers. Amazon
Lex represents a great opportunity for us to deliver a new
experience to our patients,” said Michael Krouse, Senior Vice
President Operational Support and Chief Information Officer,
OhioHealth. “Everything we do at OhioHealth is ultimately about
providing the right care to our patients at the right time and in
the right place. Amazon Lex’s next generation technology and the
innovative applications we are developing while using it will help
provide an enhanced customer experience. We are just scratching the
surface of what is possible.”
HubSpot is a marketing and sales software leader. “HubSpot's
GrowthBot is an all-in-one chatbot which helps marketers and sales
people be more productive by providing access to relevant data and
services using a conversational interface. With GrowthBot,
marketers can get help creating content, researching competitors,
and monitoring their analytics. Through Amazon Lex, we’re adding
sophisticated natural language processing capabilities that helps
GrowthBot provide a more intuitive UI for our users,” said Dharmesh
Shah, Chief Technology Officer and Founder, HubSpot. “Amazon Lex
lets us take advantage of advanced AI and machine learning without
having to code the algorithms ourselves.”
Twilio helps businesses make communications relevant and
contextual by making it possible to easily embed real-time
communication and authentication capabilities directly into
software applications. “Developers and businesses use Twilio to
build apps that can communicate with customers in virtually every
corner of the world,” said Benjamin Stein, Director of Messaging
Products, Twilio. “Amazon Lex will provide developers with an
easy-to-use modular architecture and comprehensive APIs to enable
building and deploying conversational bots on mobile platforms. We
look forward to seeing what our customers build using Twilio and
Amazon Lex.”
Intelligent Speech with Amazon Polly
Amazon Polly makes it easy for developers to add
natural-sounding speech capabilities to existing applications like
newsreaders and e-learning platforms, or create entirely new
categories of speech-enabled products – from mobile apps to devices
and appliances. Amazon Polly is easy to use; developers can send
text to Amazon Polly using the SDK or from within the AWS
Management Console and Polly immediately returns an audio stream
that can be played directly or stored in a standard audio file
format. With 47 lifelike voices and support for 24 languages,
developers can choose from both male and female voices with a
variety of accents to make applications for users around the globe.
And Amazon Polly’s fluid pronunciation of text content means
applications deliver high-quality voice output across a wide
variety of text formats. Amazon Polly is scalable, returning
high-quality speech fast, even when converting large volumes of
text to speech. With Amazon Polly, developers pay only for the text
they convert, and they can cache generated speech and replay it as
many times as they like with no restrictions.
The Washington Post is a Pulitzer Prize-winning media and
technology company that publishes more than 1200 stories a day.
“We’ve long been interested in providing audio versions of our
stories, but have found that existing text-to-speech solutions are
not cost-effective for the speech quality they offer,” said Joseph
Price, Senior Product Manager, The Washington Post. “With the
arrival of Amazon Polly and its high-quality voices, we look
forward to offering readers more rich and versatile ways to
experience our content.”
GoAnimate is a cloud-based, animated video creation platform,
designed to allow business people with no background in animation
to quickly and easily create animated videos. “Amazon Polly gives
GoAnimate users the ability to immediately give voice to the
characters they animate using our platform. This is especially
helpful in scenarios where live voiceover is either resource or
time prohibitive, such as when developing a video in many
languages, or within pre-production to speed the approval process,”
said Alvin Hung, CEO and Founder, GoAnimate. “The speech from
Amazon Polly is integrated seamlessly with our rich set of
pre-animated assets, which reinforces GoAnimate’s ease of use and
affords our customers both efficiency and speed to market.”
Intelligent Image Analysis with Amazon Rekognition
Amazon Rekognition enables developers to quickly and easily
build applications that analyze images, and recognize faces,
objects, and scenes. Amazon Rekognition uses deep learning
technologies to automatically identify objects and scenes, such as
vehicles, pets, or furniture, and provides a confidence score that
lets developers tag images so that application users can search for
specific images using key words. Amazon Rekognition can locate
faces within images and detect attributes, such as whether or not
the face is smiling or the eyes are open. Amazon Rekognition also
supports advanced facial analysis functionalities such as face
comparison and facial search. Using Rekognition, developers can
build an application that measures the likelihood that faces in two
images are of the same person, thereby being able to verify a user
against a reference photo in near real-time. Similarly, developers
can create collections of millions of faces (detected in images)
and can search for a face similar to their reference image in the
collection. Amazon Rekognition removes the complexity and overhead
required to develop and manage expensive image processing pipelines
by making comprehensive image classification, detection, and
management capabilities available in a simple, cost-effective, and
reliable AWS service. There are no upfront costs for Amazon
Rekognition, developers pay only for the images they analyze and
the facial feature vectors they store.
Redfin is a full-service brokerage that uses modern technology
to help people buy and sell houses. “Redfin users love to browse
images of properties on our site and mobile apps, and we want to
make it easier for our users to sift through hundreds of millions
of listing and images,” says Yong Huang, Director of Big Data &
Analytics, Redfin. “Amazon Rekognition generates a rich set of tags
directly from images of properties. This makes it relatively simple
to build a smart search feature that helps customers discover
houses based on their specific needs, such as a fireplace, yard, or
swimming pool. And since Rekognition accepts Amazon S3 URLs, it is
a huge time-saver to detect objects, scenes, and faces without
having to move images around.”
SmugMug is a safe and beautiful home for photos that stores
billions of beautiful photos for millions of amazing customers
every day. “SmugMug customers want to spend their time making more
memories, not manually managing their photo collection,” said Don
MacAskill, Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chief Geek,
SmugMug. “Amazon Rekognition will allow us to automatically
identify the content in customers’ photos, unlocking a host of
features that will allow them and their visitors to have more time
to focus on enjoying life and celebrating their photos.”
Deep Learning and AI on AWS
Amazon Polly is available today in US East (N. Virginia), US
East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and EU (Dublin) Regions, and will
expand to additional Regions in the coming months. Amazon
Rekognition is available in US East (N. Virginia), US West
(Oregon), and EU (Dublin) Regions, and will expand to additional
Regions in the coming months. Customers can sign up for the Amazon
Lex preview starting today.
In addition to these services, AWS recently announced it is
investing significantly in MXNet, an open source distributed deep
learning framework, initially developed by Carnegie Mellon
University and other top universities, by contributing code and
improving the developer experience. MXNet will enable machine
learning scientists to build scalable deep learning models that can
significantly reduce the training time for their applications. For
more information on AWS support for MXNet, visit:
http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2016/11/mxnet-default-framework-deep-learning-aws.html.
AWS also makes it easy for developers to run their own deep
learning and machine learning workloads to build their own AI
platform on top of AWS. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2),
with its broad set of instance types and GPUs with large amounts of
memory, is ideal for deep learning training. P2 instances, launched
in September 2016, were designed for large-scale machine learning
and deep learning with up to 8 NVIDIA Tesla K80 Accelerators, each
running a pair of NVIDIDA GK210 GPUs that have 12 GiB of memory and
2,496 parallel processing cores. And, customers can make use of
AWS’s Deep Learning AMI, which contains six pre-configured and
pre-tested deep learning frameworks including all dependencies,
Nvidia drivers, and data science tools like Jupyter and Anaconda.
In addition, AWS CloudFormation templates are available for
training deep neural networks at scale in just a few clicks.
About Amazon Web Services
For 10 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most
comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over
70 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases,
analytics, mobile, Internet of Things (IoT) and enterprise
applications from 38 Availability Zones (AZs) across 14 geographic
regions in the U.S., Australia, Brazil, China, Germany, Ireland,
Japan, Korea, Singapore, and India. AWS services are trusted by
more than a million active customers around the world – including
the fastest growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading
government agencies – to power their infrastructure, make them more
agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit
http://aws.amazon.com.
About Amazon
Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather
than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to
operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews,
1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment
by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets,
Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and
services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit
www.amazon.com/about.
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