Every day Artificial Intelligence steps forward. Especially among the big names in the high-tech business who are using it more and more for their sales and customer care services.
And, once again, Amazon is the pioneer in this: after revealing, last October, that they had implemented their Echo, the intelligent speaker equipped with a voice-commanded AI system, the e-commerce giant has announced they will release three brand new AI services , which are bound to facilitate the work of app developers.
We are talking about Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly and Amazon Rekognition.
The first, Amazon Lex, has been designed for the creation of conversational interfaces using both the human voice and text. Thanks to Lex, developers can create and test bots directly in the Amazon Web Services Management Console (AWS), typing some sample sentences together with instructions and obtaining the parameters needed to carry out the work. Then Lex will build the linguistic model and asks follow-up questions needed to complete the operation.
Amazon Polly, instead, enables developers to add voice-controlled functions, with a natural sound, to apps such as newsreader or e-learning platforms. They can send text messages to Polly using the SDK or from inside the AWS Management Console and Polly returns an audio string of sounds which can be listened directly or memorized in a standard audio format. Polly boasts a set of 47 voices, both manly and womanly, and 24 languages with different accents users can choose among.
Finally, Amazon Rekognition enables developers to create apps which can analyze images and recognize faces, objects and scenes. This AI service can identify faces inside pictures and spot special features such as smiles or open eyes. Moreover, Rekognition supports tools for face analysis such as face comparison or face research. Basically, by using Rekognition, developers can create an app to calculate live how likely two pictures are to portray the same person or to create databases containing million of pictures and compare them with a given face to check correspondences.
“The combination of some of the best algorithms, big data and the cloud calculation potential is making AI a reality for developers. We are simply enthusiastic about the use they will make of Lex, Polly and Rekognition to create a new generation of apps, with a sort of human intelligence, which can see things, hear things, talk and interact with people ” has recently declared Raju Gulabani, vice AI of AWS.
In the meantime, however, while AI is progressing, some doubts have arisen about its ethicality. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM and Facebook have started a partnership to face the most relevant ethical issues. That is to say: AI is fine, but we’d better handle it with care!
What do you think about the use of AI applied to bots and users’ services? I would like to get your comments. Tweet me @agostinellialdo.
If you liked this post, you should read: Why more businesses are turning to artificial intelligence.
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