Amazon's Alexa voice tech is now available to build chatbots

Amazon is making its voice-control technology available to all, giving developers access to the same tools that power its digital assistant Alexa. The platform is called Amazon Lex, and bundles in both speech recognition, text recognition, and conversational interactions. It was first announced in a "preview phase" in late 2016, but according to a new report from Reuters, is now rolling out to all developers. Amazon Lex will allow tech companies to quickly make voice or text-based chat interfaces for their apps, making them interactive in the same way as Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant. A lot of big Silicon Valley firms have seen an opportunity in selling these sorts of easy-to-use AI tools, and both Google and Microsoft also offer their own suite of similar services.