AWS launches Amazon Lex, a bot framework that powers Alexa

Following years of mounting interest in a type of artificial intelligence (AI) called deep learning, the biggest public cloud infrastructure provider, Amazon Web Services (AWS), today announced its first Amazon AI services that make use of deep learning. Deep learning generally involves training artificial neural networks on lots of data, such as photos, and then getting them to make inferences about new data. One of AWS' top competitors, Google Cloud Platform, introduced the Cloud Machine Learning service that can do deep learning earlier this year. In China, the Alibaba public cloud has the DT PAI service available for AI workloads. There is the new Rekognition image recognition service -- presumably drawing on the talent and technology from deep learning startup Orbeus, whose team Amazon hired in the past year.