Amazon Shows Off Many New Cloud Apps, Services at AWS Summit

Amazon Web Service’s AWS Summit in San Francisco touched on everything from artificial intelligence to improved image recognition. Arguably the biggest announcement was Amazon Lex, a new tool for companies to integrate Alexa’s digital assistant features into their applications and cloud services. Amazon also announced a new way for AWS users to moderate images users upload to their sites, as well as a new tool businesses can use to run complex data queries without pre-loading data or preparation requirements. Amazon also talked about the continued rapid growth of the popular cloud platform. Read on for more from the Amazon’s AWS 2017 Summit.

Amazon announced during its keynote that AWS is growing rapidly and companies worldwide continue to invest in its cloud solutions. AWS Marketplace now has more than 135,000 customers and more than 3,800 software listings, with more than 1,200 independent software vendors signed on, it noted.

Amazon announced a new service at the summit called Lex, powered by the company’s virtual personal assistant Alexa. It allows developers to create applications that can have human-like dialogue with users. Lex’s cost will be based on the number of text and voice responses the Alexa engine processes through the apps.

Amazon launched Redshift Spectrum at AWS. The service, which runs on Amazon Redshift, enables users to run complex data queries on content that’s stored in the Amazon Simple Storage Service without any pre-formatting or data preparation. Amazon claims Redshift Spectrum will reduce storage “inefficiencies.”

Also at AWS, Amazon launched a public preview for the Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator, a service that sits in front of DynamoDB tables and can return query responses in microseconds, according to Amazon. The service will be ideal for “eventually consistent red-intensive workloads,” it says.

To boost the number of apps running on AWS, Amazon announced a cloud service called AWS CodeStar. The offering is designed to help developers more quickly build, test and deploy software through AWS and comes with templates, pre-configured dashboards and other tools.

Amazon provided an update on X-Ray, its service that lets users see detailed information about data requests and trace that information across the platform. X-Ray is now in general availability. Additionally, Amazon integrated AWS Lambda with X-Ray to provide insight on function executions and performance. That’s currently in preview.

Amazon Polly is getting some new features, the company announced at AWS. The deep-learning service is adding Speech Marks, which enables developers to deliver enhanced lip-synching, and Whispering, which can whisper certain words whenever it’s called for in the text. Whispering will be added to Polly’s text-to-speech feature.

Amazon announced it’s opening the preview of Amazon Aurora, its MySQL-compatible relational database, with PostgreSQL Compatibility. Amazon added PostgreSQL in response to so many companies (and its customers) using the open-source database. Now it’s available for customers to test.

Mobile Hub users now have access to Automatic Speech recognition and Natural Language Understanding with help from Amazon Lex, Amazon announced. The company noted the feature could help with IT help desk systems, customer support and more for their mobile apps.

Amazon launched Rekognition last year to help companies quickly detect and recognize what’s happening in a picture. This year, Amazon announced availability of a moderation feature that helps filter out content that might be inappropriate for company sites or services.