Apps that listen are great, but apps that can listen and respond are even better!
Amazon Lex from AWS (Amazon Web Services) makes it quick and easy to build applications that listen and respond using voice and text.
With Amazon Lex, any developer now has access to the sustained artificial intelligence technology that powers Amazon Alexa.
With Amazon Lex, you can build conversational interfaces, often called chatbots, into any application cost-effectively and at scale.
Developers can take advantage of high-quality speech and text comprehension features through a simple and intuitive dashboard of Amazon Lex that is extremely easy to use.
You can log in and build your first chatbot today in just minutes with no upfront cost. Or, get access to data on 137 Amazon Lex Customers' websites.
To learn more about Amazon Lex, keep reading this blog.
What is Amazon Lex?
Amazon Lex is a service using which you can build a chatbot, with which you can have human-like conversations.
Amazon Lex uses advanced deep learning technologies like automatic speech recognition. To comprehend the meaning of the text, you can use speech-to-text conversion and natural language understanding.
So in simple terms, by using Amazon Lex, you can build a chatbot of your choice without having any prior knowledge of complex technologies!
Key features of Amazon Lex
1. Natural conversations
It provides automatic and high-quality speech recognition and natural language understanding technologies to get a speech-language understanding system.
The same proven technology is used by Amazon Lex that powers Alexa.
Amazon Lex can learn the various ways users can express their purpose based on a small number of sample utterances provided by the developer.
The speech-language understanding system takes natural language speech and text input, decodes the user’s intent, and then invokes the appropriate response to carry out the user’s intent.
2. Multi-turn dialog
Amazon Lex offers the ability for multi-turn conversations and an easy way to build multi-turn conversations for your chatbots.
Users will be prompted for the information required to fulfill their intent (for instance, if their intent is to "Book hotel," they will be asked for the check-in date, location, number of nights, etc.).
By prompting for the appropriate slot, Amazon Lex orchestrates the dialogue.
3. Telephony audio at 8 kHz is supported
The voice recognition accuracy for telephone use cases has been improved thanks to training on telephony audio (8 kHz sampling rate) by the Amazon Lex speech recognition engine.
You can have discussions that go on for several turns with Amazon Lex bots.
4. Context management
Managing context across multi-turn discussions is necessary to classify utterances accurately as the conversation develops.
You can manage the context directly without needing custom code because Amazon Lex natively supports context management.
As initial prerequisite intents are completed, you can create "contexts" to invoke related intents. It simplifies bot design and speeds up the creation of conversational experiences.
5. Powerful lifecycle management capabilities
Amazon Lex allows you to add versioning to your Intents, Slot Types, and Bots.
In a multi-developer environment, versioning and rollback mechanisms enable you to maintain code as you test and deploy easily.
Each Amazon Lex bot can have multiple aliases and different versions, such as "production," "development," and “test.”
This enables you to keep improving, changing the bot, and releasing new versions under the same alias.
6. One-click deployment to multiple platforms
Publishing your bot to chat services directly from the Amazon Lex console is a simple process made possible by Amazon Lex, which minimizes the need for cross-platform development.
Chat applications such as Facebook Messenger, Slack, and Twilio SMS benefit from rich formatting capabilities.
7. Enhanced console experience
The Lex V2 console experience makes building, deploying, and managing conversational experiences simpler.
With Lex V2, a new language may be added to a bot at any moment. You can manage all the languages through the lifecycle of design, testing, and deployment as a single resource.
You efficiently manage your bot versions with streamlined information architecture.
8. Streaming conversations
Natural conversations include pauses and interruptions.
For example, a caller may ask to pause a conversation or hold the line while looking up information before answering a question in order to retrieve credit card information when making a bill payment.
As you set up the bot with streaming conversation APIs, you can pause a conversation and deal with interruptions immediately.
You can quickly enhance your conversational capability with virtual contact center agents or intelligent assistants.
9. Integration with Amazon Kendra
Customer service conversations frequently involves locating specific information in order to answer specific questions.
To access a machine learning-powered, highly accurate, and user-friendly intelligent search tool, you can use Amazon Kendra.
Advantages of Amazon Lex
- Flexibility
- Reduce the manual effort
- Machine learning technology that is more affordable
- Automatic deployment and growth
- Cost-effectiveness
- Ease of Access
- Seamless deployment and scaling
- Built-in integration with the AWS platform
- SDK support.
- Natural Language Processing
- Speech and text support
- Utterance Monitoring
- AWS lambda integration
- SaaS Connectors
- Mobile integration
Disadvantages of Amazon Lex
- Complex web integration.
- Fewer deployment channels.
- Lex only supports English and is not multilingual.
- It has complicated data set preparation, critical utterances, and entity mapping.
Amazon Lex pricing
- Freemium.
- Quotation Based.
- Pay for usage: Bot at $0.004 per voice request and $0.00075 per text request.
- If your chatbot application handled 2,000 voice queries, the price would be $8.
- If your chatbot program performed 2,000 text inquiries, the cost would be $1.50
Amazon Lex Integrations
- Amazon Kendra
- Amazon Polly
- AWS Lambda
- Amazon Connect
- Genesys Cloud CX
- Amazon Chime SDK
- AWS Contact Center Intelligence (CCI)
Wrapping it up
Amazon Lex can be your go-to software to build conversational features on AWS.
It has shown promise with deep learning power, natural language understanding, and automatic speech recognition.
Additionally, it helps you establish new product lines and create a highly interactive customer experience with genuine, honest communication.
Lastly, to understand and recognize the speech, its broad adoption across industries enables organizations and customers to rapidly and efficiently manage repetitive and monotonous requests.
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