Amazon Lex is for building conversational interfaces using voice and text and is built on the same automatic speech recognition) technology and natural language understanding that powers Amazon Alexa. Developers can build and test chat bots 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.
Amazon Polly makes it possible for developers to add natural-sounding speech capabilities to existing applications like newsreaders and e-learning platforms, or create new categories of speech-enabled products such as mobile apps and devices and appliances. Developers can send text to Amazon Polly using the SDK or from within the AWS Management Console and Pollyreturns an audio stream that can be played directly or stored in a standard audio file format. It offers a choice of 47 lifelike voices and support for 24 languages. 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.
Amazon Rekognition enables developers to 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. There are no upfront costs for Amazon Rekognition, developers pay only for the images they analyze and the facial feature vectors they store.
Amazon Polly and Rokognition are available starting in select US regions and Dublin for AWS customers, and Amazon Lex is available for preview.
In addition to these services, AWS 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.
