Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text. Lex provides the advanced deep learning functionalities of automatic speech recognition (ASR) for converting speech to text, and natural language understanding (NLU) to recognize the intent of the text, to enable you to build applications with highly engaging user experiences and lifelike conversational interactions. With Amazon Lex, the same deep learning technologies that power Amazon Alexa are now available to any developer, enabling you to quickly and easily build sophisticated, natural language, conversational bots (“chatbots”).
Speech recognition and natural language understanding are some of the most challenging problems to solve in computer science, requiring sophisticated deep learning algorithms to be trained on massive amounts of data and infrastructure. Amazon Lex democratizes these deep learning technologies by putting the power of Alexa within reach of all developers. Harnessing these technologies, Lex enables you to define entirely new categories of products made possible through conversational interfaces.
As a fully managed service, Lex scales automatically, so you don’t need to worry about managing infrastructure. With Amazon Lex, you pay only for what you use. There are no upfront commitments or minimum fees.
Easy to Use
Amazon Lex provides an easy-to-use console to guide you through the process of creating your own chatbot in minutes, building conversational interfaces into your applications. You supply just a few example phrases and Lex builds a complete natural language model through which your user can interact using voice and text, to ask questions, get answers, and complete sophisticated tasks.
Seamlessly Deploy and Scale
With Amazon Lex, you can build, test, and deploy your chatbots directly from the Amazon Lex console. Lex enables you to easily publish your voice or text chatbots to mobile devices, web apps, and chat services such as Facebook Messenger (with Slack and Twilio integration coming soon). Once published, your Amazon Lex bot processes voice or text input in conversation with your end-users. Amazon Lex is a fully managed service so as your user engagement increases, you don’t need to worry about provisioning hardware and managing infrastructure to power your bot experience.
Built-in Integration with the AWS Platform
Amazon Lex provides built-in integration with AWS Lambda, AWS MobileHub and Amazon CloudWatch and you can easily integrate with many other services on the AWS platform including Amazon Cognito, and Amazon DynamoDB. You can take advantage of the power of the AWS platform for security, monitoring, user authentication, business logic, storage and mobile app development.
Cost Effective
With Amazon Lex, there are no upfront costs or minimum fees. You are only charged for the text or speech requests that are made. Amazon Lex’ pay-as-you-go pricing and low cost per request make it a cost-effective way to build conversational interfaces anywhere. With the Amazon Lex free tier, you can easily try Lex without any initial investment.
You can use Amazon Lex to build chatbots for everyday consumer requests, such as accessing the latest news updates, game scores, or weather. After you build your Amazon Lex bot, you can deploy them on mobile devices, chat services, and IoT devices, with support for rich formatting.
"We are excited about utilizing evolving speech recognition and natural language processing technology to enhance the lives of our customers. Amazon Lex represents a great opportunity for us to deliver a better experience to our patients. Everything we do at OhioHealth is ultimately about providing the right care to our patients at the right time and in the right place. Amazon Lex’s next generation technology and the innovative applications we are developing using it will help provide an improved customer experience. We are just scratching the surface of what is possible.”
– Michael Krouse, Senior Vice President Operational Support and Chief Information officer, OhioHealth
Amazon Lex’s high-quality speech recognition and natural language understanding capabilities make it possible to build powerful interfaces to mobile applications. You can add a voice or text chat interface to create bots on mobile devices that can help customers with many basic tasks, such as accessing their bank account, booking tickets, ordering food, or calling a cab. Amazon Lex integrates with Amazon Cognito so you can control user management, authentication, and sync across all devices.
For Capital One "as a heavy user of AWS, Amazon Lex’s seamless integration with other AWS services like AWS Lambda and Amazon DynamoDB is really appealing. A highly scalable solution, Amazon Lex also offers the potential to speed time to market for a new generation of voice and text interactions such as our recently launched Capital One skill for Alexa.”
- Firoze Lafeer, CTO, Capital One Labs, Capital One
You can use Amazon Lex to build enterprise chatbots that streamline common work activities and improve organizational efficiencies. For example, employees can check sales data from Salesforce, marketing performance from HubSpot, and customer service status from Zendesk, directly from their chatbots within minutes. With Lex, you can build your bots to connect to a variety of enterprise productivity tools through AWS Lambda functions.
“HubSpot's GrowthBot is 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. With GrowthBot, marketers can get help creating content, researching competitors, and monitoring their analytics. Through Amazon Lex, we're adding sophisticated natural language processing capabilities that helps GrowthBot provide a more intuitive UI for our users. Amazon Lex lets us take advantage of advanced AI and machine learning without having to code the algorithms ourselves.”
- Dharmesh Shah, HubSpot CTO and Founder
With Amazon Lex, you can build highly interactive and conversational user experiences for connected devices in the rapidly growing segment of Internet of Things (IoT). This creates opportunities for entirely new categories of conversational products in a variety of markets – from cars and devices, to wearables and appliances.
To inspire the next generation of explorers, NASA reaches out to students in schools, community organizations, and public events. A star robotic ambassador is “Rov-E,” a close replica of real NASA Mars rovers. Through Amazon Lex, NASA staff can now easily navigate Rov-E via voice commands -- an effective conversational interface when speaking with large crowds. Multi-turn dialog management capability enables Rov-E "to talk,” answering students’ questions about Mars in an engaging way. Integration with AWS services allows Rov-E to connect and scale with various data sources to retrieve NASA’s Mars exploration information.
To get started using Amazon Lex, sign up for the preview program. Once approved, you can start building conversational interfaces for your apps in just a few clicks.
