Amazon Launches AI Platform For Developers

Amazon announced last week the launch of its new Amazon AI platform, which brings machine-learning technologies to developers.

According to a report by TechCrunch, Amazon launched the Amazon AI platform at its re:Invent developer event held in Las Vegas. In the beginning, the new service will make three tools available for developers, but more will be included in the future. While Amazon doesn’t tout all of its work in machine learning, the company said it does a lot of it behind the scenes. “We do a lot of AI in our company,” said Amazon Web Services Chief Executive Andy Jassy, according to the report. “We have thousands of people dedicated to AI in our business.”

One of the tools Amazon is rolling out under the new Amazon AI platform is an image recognition service that recognizes objects and scenes and falls under its Rekognition umbrella. Amazon said the system can even pinpoint the breed of a dog in an image, something its competitors don’t do, noted the report.

Another tool being rolled out under the new platform is Amazon Polly, which is a text-to-speech service that can produce speech that sounds lifelike. “Polly was designed to address many of the more challenging aspects of speech generation,” Amazon said, according to the report. “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 spelled the same but are pronounced quite differently.”

The final tool — and one that powers Amazon’s Alexa, its personal assistant — is known as Lex and allows developers to create conversational applications. “You can use Amazon Lex to build chatbots and other types of web and mobile applications that support engaging, lifelike interactions,” Amazon said, according to the report. “Your bots can provide information, power your application, streamline work activities or provide a control mechanism for robots, drones and toys.”