Amazon Web Services introduces AI services for developers

You: Alexa, what’s the weather in Manila, Philippines?

Alexa: Currently, the weather in Manila is 79 degrees F with cloudy skies.

You: Alexa, what’s my flash briefing?

Alexa: (Reads the news from your designated websites.)

You: Alexa, play “Come Back Home” by2NE1 from Spotify

Alexa: Playing “Come Back Home” by2NE1 from Spotify

You: Alexa, sing.

Alexa: Who, me? (But sings anyway)

MANILA, Philippines – This is not a phone conversation or a chat session with a customer service representative. Alexa is the digital voice assistant residing inside Amazon’s wifi-enabled, voice-controlled smart speakers Amazon Echo and Amazon Echo Dot.

Her capabilities go beyond rattling off the day’s news or the weather, or playing music. She can order pizza, shoes, jewellery or even an Uber ride (at least in the US). You can ask her to turn on or off your TV, the lights or adjust the temperature in your room (provided you have a connected home).  She can tell you what photosynthesis is or what’s the score in the last game of the Cavaliers versus the Warriors. She can compute basic mathematical equations or tell a joke.

The good news is that any company - from startups to SMEs to large enterprises can now build Alexa-like applications. At Amazon Web Services (AWS) annual user conference in Las Vegas early this month, the company unveiled three artificial intelligence (AI) services that would make it easy for developers to build apps that can understand natural language, turn text into lifelike speech, have conversations using voice or text, or analyze images.

“Part of the promise of artificial intelligence and machine learning is making more application intelligent,” said AWS CEO Andy Jassy. Though the company has launched machine learning a couple of years ago and there are actually lot of companies now doing machine learning on top of AWS, these are meant for machine learning expert practitioners. 

The Amazon Echo Dot voice-controlled smart speaker is powered by Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa.

“We are also very focused on making it easier for everyday developers who aren’t machine learning experts to be able to do machine learning and get utility of their data on top of the platform,” he said.

Amazon Lex  

The first of the three AI services unveiled is Amazon Lex, the technology that powers Amazon Alexa. The service will enable even small companies to build conversational interfaces using voice and text built on automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology and natural language understanding (NLU).

 This means developers can build and test bots or conversational apps that perform automated tasks such as “find a flight” or “book a flight.” The app should also be able to offer corresponding clarifying questions such as “when do you want to travel?” or “where do you want to go?” then builds the language model and asks the follow-up questions needed to complete the task. 

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 simplifies the user interface design by not requiring developers to write custom code for each platform.  

 Image Recognition And Text-To-Speech

The two other AI services released were Amazon Rekognition and Amazon Polly.

Amazon Rekognition enables developers to quickly and easily build applications that analyze images, and recognize faces, objects, and scenes. It 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.

“Rekognition allows you to pass an image to us either through an API or SDK and we will detect objects in an image,” Jassy explained. “It can do facial recognition so we can tell you what’s happening to the face, what is the sentiment - is the person smiling or frowning? It also does facial matching, which is useful for applications in the security space.”

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 Polly, on the other hand, transforms text into lifelike speech, enabling apps to talk with 47 lifelike voices in 24 languages. “Polly allows you to take a stream of text and submit it to a service and Polly will create an MP3 audio stream that will repeat what you typed. There is intelligence inside Polly. It allows you to cache the responses so you can use them repeatedly. Response time is very fast,” Jassy said.

Until now very few developers have been able to build, deploy, and broadly scale apps with AI capabilities, according to AWS. And this is because doing so required access to vast amounts of data, and specialized expertise in machine learning and neural networks. Because Amazon AI services are fully managed services, there are no deep learning algorithms to build, no machine learning models to train, and no up-front commitments or infrastructure investments required. 

Real-World Applications

Currently, several big name companies are already using these Amazon AI Services. 

Marketing and sales software company HubSpot has built GrowthBot, 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. 

GoAnimate, a cloud-based, animated video creation platform, allows 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 Washington Post publishes more than 1200 stories a day and has long been interested in providing audio versions of its stories, according to 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.”

In a new report, research firm IDC recently predicted that 35 percent of leading organizations in logistics, health, utilities and resources will explore the use of robots to automated operations by 2019.

“Technological development in artificial intelligence, computer vision, navigation, MEMS sensor, and semiconductor technologies continue to drive innovation in the capability, performance, autonomy, ease of use, and cost-effectiveness of industrial and service robots,” said Dr. Jing Bing Zhang, research director, Worldwide Robotics and Asia-Pacific Manufacturing Insights, IDC Asia-Pacific in a media release.

Are we looking at a new era of smart machines? IDC said that by 2019, 30 percent of leading organizations will also implement a chief robotics officer role and define a robotics-specific function within the business. By 2020, it said 60 percent of robots will depend on cloud-based software to define new skills, cognitive capabilities, and application programs, leading to the formation of a robotics cloud marketplace.