AWS Lex Service
An AWS Lex Service is a PaaS conversational bot platform managed by AWS.
- Context:
- It can be configured through an AWS Lex Console or an AWS Lex API.
- …
- Example(s):
- AWS Lex v2:
- …
- AWS Lex v1:
- AWS Lex v1, 2018-10-01, still only English.
- AWS Lex v1, 2016-03-27.
- …
- AWS Lex v2:
- Counter-Example(s):
- See: AWS Machine Learning, NLU System, AWS Chatbot.
References
2017a
- http://docs.aws.amazon.com/lex/latest/dg/programming-model.html
- QUOTE: A bot is the primary resource type in Amazon Lex. The other resource types in Amazon Lex are intent, slot type, alias, and bot channel association. …
2017b
- https://aws.amazon.com/lex
- QUOTE: 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.
- QUOTE: 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”).
2017b
- https://console.aws.amazon.com/lex/home?region=us-east-1#bot-create:
- QUOTE: … Amazon Lex enables any developer to build conversational chatbots quickly and easily. With Amazon Lex, no deep learning expertise is necessary — you just specify the basic conversational flow directly from the console, and then Amazon Lex manages the dialogue and dynamically adjusts the response. To get started, you can choose one of the sample bots provided below or build a new custom bot from scratch. …
2017c
- https://aws.amazon.com/lex/details/
- QUOTE: Key Features
- High Quality Speech Recognition and Natural Language Understanding:
Amazon Lex provides automatic speech recognition and natural language understanding technologies to create a Speech Language Understanding system. Lex uses the same proven technology that powers Alexa. Amazon Lex is able to learn the many different ways someone could express their intent based on the sample utterances provided by the developer. The speech language understanding system takes natural language speech and text input, understands the intent behind the input, and fulfills the user intent by invoking the appropriate response. - Multi-turn conversations:
Amazon Lex bots provide the ability for multi-turn conversations. Once an intent has been identified, users will be prompted for information that is required for the intent to be fulfilled (for example, if “Book hotel” is the intent, the user is prompted for the location, check-in date, number of nights, etc.). Amazon Lex gives you an easy way to build multi-turn conversations for your chatbots. You simply list the slots/parameters you want to collect from your bot users, as well as the corresponding prompts, and Amazon Lex takes care of orchestrating the dialogue by prompting for the appropriate slot. - Utility Prompts:
Amazon Lex provides two types of prompts: confirmation prompts that enable you to confirm an action before fulfilling it; and error-handling prompts, that request the user to repeat input for additional clarity. Confirmation prompts allow you to confirm the intent of the user before executing back-end business logic (for example, "Would you like to confirm your reservation now?"). Error-handling prompts address scenarios where the user input is not understood, allowing for a graceful handling of error scenarios. For example, if a user’s speech input is not clear or audible, or doesn’t map to a known intent, you can configure Amazon Lex to prompt the user to repeat information, for example, “Sorry I didn’t get that.” or “Can you please repeat that?”. You can set the number of retries and also specify the goodbye message before your app stops prompting the user. - Integration with AWS Lambda:
Amazon Lex natively supports integration with AWS Lambda for data retrieval, updates, and business logic execution. The serverless compute capacity allows effortless execution of business logic at scale while you focus on developing bots. From Lambda, you can access various AWS services, such as Amazon DynamoDB for persisting conversation state and Amazon SNS for notifying end users. - Connect to Enterprise Systems:
You can also use AWS Lambda to easily integrate with your existing enterprise applications and databases. You just write your integration code and AWS Lambda automatically runs your code when needed to send or retrieve data from any external system. Amazon Lex also includes built-in connectors for popular SaaS applications like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Marketo, Zendesk, QuickBooks and Hubspot. - One-click Deployment to Multiple Platforms: Amazon Lex allows you to easily publish your bot to chat services directly from the Amazon Lex console, reducing multi-platform development efforts. Rich formatting capabilities provide an intuitive user experience tailored to chat platforms like Facebook Messenger, with Slack and Twilio integration coming soon. Amazon Lex is also integrated into AWS Mobile Hub, so you can quickly build your own mobile app to access your Amazon Lex chatbot.
- Powerful Lifecycle Management Capabilities:
Amazon Lex lets you apply versioning to Intents, Slot Types, and Bots that you create. Versioning enables you to easily maintain code as you test and deploy in a multi-developer environment, including implementation of rollback mechanisms. You can create multiple aliases for each Amazon Lex bot and associate different versions to each - for example, “production”, “development” and “test”. This enables you to continue to make improvements and changes to the bot and release new versions to associate them with the same alias, rather than making changes to all clients whenever a new version of the bot is deployed. Versioning and alias support together allow you to easily build and manage a bot through its lifecycle. - Intent Chaining: An intent performs an action in response to natural language user input. Amazon Lex can transfer control dynamically from one intent to another based on end user input. This enables you to simplify complex conversations by breaking them into smaller components. For example, in a travel bot, after a user has booked a flight, you can build your bot to subsequently ask if the user also wants to make a hotel or a car reservation. The user response could then result in either making additional reservations, or decline any additional bookings. Amazon Lex will handle the flow accordingly.
- High Quality Speech Recognition and Natural Language Understanding:
- QUOTE: Key Features