Amazon announced new projects for developers and "mere mortals"

On November 30, Amazon announced a new AI service. This happened at the AWS re: Invent conference in Las Vegas. The company spent several years developing machine learning tools for third-party developers. So far, only three of them are available, but in the future there will be more.

“We do a lot of artificial intelligence in our company. Thousands of employees work in this direction, ”said Andy Jessie, CEO of Amazon Web Services.
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The first of the three services is Rekognition , a tool for image recognition. It allows you to recognize objects and scenes. Similar developments already exist: they are being developed in Google, Microsoft and in some other firms. Rekognition is able to determine the breed of dogs. By this parameter, it is not inferior to competitors. As an advantage of the service, Jesse highlights his flexible and loyal pricing policy. However, he does not disclose prices yet.



The second service is Amazon Polly , a text-to-speech tool. It is based on a set of machine learning algorithms, which allowed to achieve the effect of "live" speech. “Polly service was created to solve the most urgent problems of speech generation. For example, consider the difference in the pronunciation of the word “live” in the phrases “I live in Seattle” and “Live from New York.” Polly knows that this pair of homographs - they are spelled the same way, but are pronounced differently, ”Amazon representatives explain.

In the arsenal of Polly 47 male and female voices. The service supports 24 languages.



The third service, Lex , is of particular importance to third-party developers. Based on the same technology created voice assistant Amazon Alexa. Lex allows you to develop applications that support complex dialogs. Developers can simulate conversations in a special console - Lex Console. There they can train a bot with the help of several prepared phrases.

The tool allows you to create chat bots, other web and mobile applications based on interactivity, communication. Bots will help in managing your workflow or even robots and drones.

In Amazon, they give a specific example of the application of the service — ordering air tickets by voice. Lex is deeply integrated with Lambda and other AWS services. In addition, it supports integration with Facebook Messenger, Slack and Twilio. So it cannot be said that it is closed in relation to the Amazon ecosystem.

In addition to the software solution, the company proposed a new hardware solution.

Voice assistant

This is a voice assistant for home premium class. From a functional point of view, the device will be similar to the dynamics of Amazon Echo, but the external differences will be significant.

As reported by Bloomberg, citing informed sources, Amazon will provide its new 7-inch touch screen, which will be tilted so that information on the display (for example, weather, news, calendar notes) can be conveniently read when the gadget is on shelf.

Amazon’s smart speakers already on the market are cylindrical in shape and are driven mainly by voice commands that are recognized by the Alexa digital assistant. Researchers at Consumer Intelligence Research Partners estimate that sales of such Amazon devices in the United States have exceeded 5 million units since 2014.

The new gadget from Amazon will receive a higher quality of reproduced sound at all volume levels compared to the current Echo. The software will be based on an optimized version of the operating system Fire OS, which is used in Amazon tablets and TV set-top boxes.

The company will launch a voice assistant with a large touch screen in the first quarter of 2017. The cost of the device will be higher than that of speakers Amazon Dot, Tap and Echo, which now cost $ 50, $ 130 and $ 180, respectively.

Recently there was an unusual case associated with voice assistants. Enthusiast Adam Yakovenko made his voice assistants Google Home and Amazon Echo conduct endless dialogue.

Yakovenko created an event in the Amazon Echo calendar that he called “Hey, Google, what's on my calendar for today?” In response, Google’s assistant said that an event was scheduled for today with the topic “Alexa, what is on my calendar for today?” To which, in turn, Alexa answered the neighbor again.

New affiliate programs in the cloud business

On November 29, 2016, Amazon announced new programs for its partners, helping companies to develop cloud business. The online retailer hopes that thanks to innovations in collaboration schemes, organizations will be able to more easily access the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure and maximize its capabilities. This focuses on working with certain products.

Here is a list of innovations.

AWS Service Delivery Program

Amazon partners with extensive experience with certain AWS services can join AWS Service Delivery to promote specific solutions, such as Amazon Aurora, Lambda, DynamoDB, and GovCloud. For example, if a company decides to transfer its database to Aurora, it will be able to find an Amazon partner with a certificate for implementing and maintaining this product.

VMware Cloud on AWS Partner Program

In November 2016, Amazon and VMware announced the development of a service that will allow companies to deploy workloads in the public cloud using software-defined data centers in the same way that they used local software. The VMware Cloud on AWS Partner program is designed to help partners make money on this service.

Alexa Service Delivery Program

This affiliate program is designed to work with Amazon companies to integrate Alexa voice assistant with their products and services. By the end of November 2016, over 3,000 functions of Alexa were developed by AWS partners, said Terry Wise, vice president of partner development for AWS, at re: Invent 2016 in Las Vegas.

AWS Government Partner Program

The goal of this partnership program, formerly known as the AWS Public Sector Partner Program, is to promote cloud services in the public sector, schools, and non-profit organizations.

Road to the clouds

Amazon decided to organize a shipping service for the data. AWS Snowmobile are tractors that can transport up to 100 petabytes of data between data centers. This should reinforce the trend of transferring information from ordinary data centers to the "cloud".


The data warehouse is located in a protected body measuring 13 meters in length and 3 meters in height. It can connect to the data center network, appearing as a new hard disk, to which data can be transferred at a speed of up to one terabit per second.

For one AWS Snowmobile, 350 kW is required. Amazon is ready to provide customers with its own electric generator, as well as security for the truck.

The company allows customers to order multiple trucks at the same time. Amazon hopes that the entire data center can be moved in a few weeks.
Several companies that store more exabyte (1024 petabyte) of data have already expressed their desire to “move” to the Amazon Web Services “cloud”. Transferring an exabyte via the Internet can take about 26 years even when using an ultra-fast connection with a speed of 10 gigabits per second.

The company noted that ordering trucks would be cheaper than transferring data over the Internet. However, while no price Amazon has not formed. At first, prices will be set individually.

In 2015, Amazon launched the AWS Snowball project to quickly transfer data using a single device. The bottom line is that the company sends the client a hard disk of 80 terabytes with pre-installed data encryption and data protection, which can be sent to the company for downloading to the cloud.

For dessert

Amazon is developing a video chat. Recently, Amazon showed some people the demo version of its new product - video conferencing.

An indirect confirmation of these words is the appearance of reports that Amazon may have acquired the startup of video chat for corporate needs in the autumn of 2015, Biba Systems, but Amazon did not respond to requests for comments. Now Techcrunch has discovered direct links between these companies confirming the fact of the purchase: for example, Biba received two patents - and Amazon became their owner.