Amazon's new services will help AI fulfill its manifest destiny

Amazon's cloud services platform Amazon Web Services recently announced three AI services it said will make it easy for developers to build apps that can understand natural language, turn text into speech, have conversations using voice or text, analyze images and recognize faces, objects and scenes. This, in turn, underscores the increasing importance of AI to consumers, brands and marketers, but also raises some questions about how it will – and should – be developed. Building apps with AI capabilities has been challenging to date because doing so requires access to vast amounts of data and specialized expertise in machine learning and neural networks, Amazon said in a press release. "The combination of better algorithms and broad access to massive amounts of data and cost-effective computing power provided by the cloud is making AI a reality for application developers," added Raju Gulabani, vice president of databases, analytics and AI at AWS, in a statement. "Thousands of machine learning and deep learning experts across Amazon have been developing AI technologies for years to predict what customers might like to read, to drive efficiencies in our fulfillment centers through robotics and computer vision technologies and to give customers our AI-powered virtual assistant, Alexa. Now, we are making the technology underlying these innovations available to any developer…we are excited to see how customers use Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly and Amazon Rekognition to build a new generation of apps that have human-like intelligence and can see, hear, speak and interact with people and their environments."