Amazon is bringing Alexa's brainpower to its cloud business

Today, Amazon announced three new artificial intelligence tools for developers that use Amazon Web Services, the company's cloud division. Drawing on the artificial intelligence that powers Amazon's popular home assistant Alexa, the new tools will allow developers to build apps that have conversational interfaces, can turn text into speech and use computer vision that is capable of recognizing faces and objects. Amazon's latest push follows moves from Google and Microsoft, both of which have cloud computing platforms that already use artificial intelligence. Google's G Suite, for example, uses AI to power Smart Reply in Gmail, instant translation and smart scheduling functions in its calendar. Likewise, Microsoft recently announced it's bringing artificial intelligence to its Office 365 service to add search within Word, provide productivity tracking and build maps from Excel with geographic data.