Amazon unveils artificial intelligence products for cloud
Baku, December 1 AZERTAC
Amazon.com Inc. introduced an image recognition program, a speech-to-text service dubbed Polly, and tools for building conversational apps, highlighting its push to add artificial intelligence to its cloud-computer offerings.
According to Bloomberg, Andy Jassy, chief executive officer of the Amazon Web Services unit, unveiled the new products Wednesday at the company’s fifth annual re:Invent conference, which drew 32,000 people from diverse industries to Las Vegas. He pitched Amazon’s wide breadth of services and ability to customize them for clients, while poking fun at competitor Oracle Corp., which Amazon dismisses as a cloud pretender.
The feud between Amazon and Oracle heated up in September when Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison, introduced new cloud products during his company’s OpenWorld keynote address and said, “Amazon’s lead is over.”
In the third quarter, Amazon had about 45 percent of the market for infrastructure as a service, where companies buy basic computing and storage power from the cloud, according to Synergy Research Group. Amazon’s revenue is more than twice that of the next three players combined, Synergy said.
Amazon’s Web Services division is the Seattle-based company’s fastest-growing and most profitable source of revenue, offsetting regular quarterly losses from its e-commerce operation. Cloud computing revenue is projected to top $10 billion this year.
The new AI services will let customers create applications hosted on Amazon Web Services that understand what’s displayed in photos and, with a program called Lex, develop conversations in a manner similar to Amazon’s Alexa voice-activated technology. Microsoft offers the ability to bake similar artificial intelligence into applications run on its Azure cloud services and Google earlier this year launched business tools and products based on its own AI technology to entice more companies to rent its cloud-computing services.
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