[tubemonkey]

Intelligent conversations with Amazon Lex

Amazon Lex is a new service for building conversational interfaces using voice and text that is built on the same automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology and natural language understanding (NLU) that powers Amazon Alexa. Amazon Lex makes it easy to bring sophisticated, natural language capabilities to virtually any app. Developers can build and test bots (conversational apps that perform automated tasks like checking the weather or booking flights) 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 (e.g., “when do you want to travel?” and “where do you want to go?”). Amazon Lex takes care of the rest, building the language model and asking the follow-up questions needed to complete the task. Because Amazon Lex is integrated with AWS Lambda, developers can configure Amazon Lex to invoke the appropriate backend service (e.g., the flight booking service) through an AWS Lambda function. Developers can also use pre-built enterprise connectors that execute AWS Lambda functions to answer questions like “what are my top 10 accounts in Salesforce.com,” by fetching data from enterprise systems like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Marketo, Zendesk, QuickBooks and HubSpot.

Bots built using Amazon Lex can be used anywhere: from web applications, to chat and messenger apps like Slack and Facebook Messenger, or through voice in apps on mobile or connected devices. Amazon Lex handles the authentication required by different platforms and simplifies the user interface design by not requiring developers to write custom code for each platform. Moreover, developers do not have to worry about scaling their infrastructure as Amazon Lex scales automatically as traffic to a bot increases, and developers pay only for the calls made to the Amazon Lex API.