Three Amazon Services You Have Probably Not Heard Of...

Earlier this year Amazon introduced three new services and they’re actually pretty cool. Would you expect anything less from the orange giant? The services will help customers develop applications hosted on AWS that recognize images, add text-to-speech and implement technology from Amazon’s Alexa.

Amazon Rekognition

Amazon Rekognition is a service that recognizes actual images. It can detect objects, scenes, and faces in images by going through a batch of millions of images or in real-time. Even more fascinating – it can detect smiles or frowns. Applications can be built to search and compare faces.

“It can pick out an image you ask for, of a woman, a car, a steering wheel and from that can search for images of women driving a car,” said AWS chief executive Andy Jassy about the new service.

Amazon Polly

Amazon Polly turns text into life-like speech, enabling applications to “talk”. The technology behind Polly synthesizes speech that sounds like a human’s voice - or maybe more so a parrot? “Polly want a cracker?”

For example, if you type a question about the temperature in “Wa.” or “Wash.,” Polly will know that you are referring to the state of Washington and say the name of the state rather than just “Wa.” Customers across the world can choose from over 40 lifelike voices in 24 languages. This interactive service offers quick responses as well as the ability to cache and save Polly’s speech audio to replay offline or redistribute.

Amazon Lex

Amazon Lex is the technology inside Alexa, which is in Echo devices. The service provides automatic speech recognition (ASR) for turning speech to text, and natural language understanding (NLU), which recognizes the intent of the text. Amazon Lex is a service that lets developers build natural, conversational interactions in voice and text for their business.

For example, say Lex is used at Jimmy Johns, a sandwich delivery company. If a customer asks “I’d like to order a ham and cheese,” developers can automate a response like “What toppings would you like?” The service can even provide a more personal interaction with customers by including responses like, “Okay Andy, would you like your typical order for $6.95?”

Amazon never ceases to amaze us with new developments. Contact us today to find out how we can help implement these Amazon Services into your business today!