Amazon Lex, the technology behind Amazon’s virtual personal assistant Alexa, has now been removed from its preview phase, said a report from Reuters. The technology which amalgamates features like automatic speech recognition or natural language understanding technology, was introduced for the very first time in November, at the occasion of Amazon’s AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas.
At the event, it was explained how Amazon Lex could be used by developers for building their own chatbots or mobile applications which would then support life like interactions for different conversational platforms. A a demo, the company displayed a tool which could book flight tickets simply through users voice command.
The utility of Lex is however not confined to simply the chatbots present in today’s consumer messaging apps, like Facebook Messenger. It is capable of working in any voice or text chatbot on the smartphone, web or some other chat service beyond Messenger or Slack.
Amazon has said that the tool could prove beneficial in various mobile and web applications, where the tech will provide users with information, or help in building control mechanisms for different bots or drones.
Choatbots in messaging, particularly in e-commerce, is the key area where Lex could grip its hold. The current lot of chatbots are very annoying with their long list of menus though which one has to navigate. Lex will directly convert the speech to text in order to understand the purpose of the speaker better than ever, making it more sophisticated and communicative. And thus easing the shopping process.
By opening Lex to different development communities, Amazon could take a shot on beating other leading voice technologies like Google Assistant or Apple’s Siri. The company is planning to take recordings and notes from different Lex-powered apps in order to improve its platform. Previously, Amazon had rolled out Alexa Voice Services which enables developers to integrate Alexa into their own speakers, alarm clocks or other devices, and this step is an extension to it.
Alexa’s software is not the first one to be introduced into an open ecosystem by Amazon. Earlier this month the company has already made a declaration that the technology powering its Eco Speakers will be made available to third party makers.
So, this is one perfect opportunity for the developers to utilize Amazon’s very own voice powered products to come up with a merchandise which could probably compete with Amazon’s Eco Speakers itself.
