AWS AI Service Amazon Lex, Technology in Echo's Alexa, Coming To All Customers

Amazon is keeping up in the artificial intelligence race against other companies, like Apple, Google and Microsoft. To do that, Amazon is bringing the technology inside Alexa, Amazon Lex, to all customers, the company announced Wednesday. Amazon Lex was introduced last year at the AWS re:Invent 2016 conference in Las Vegas along with AI services Amazon Rekognition and Amazon Polly. Amazon Lex provides automatic speech recognition, for turning speech to text, and natural language understanding, which recognizes the intent of the text. The service lets developers create natural, conversational interactions in voice and text for their businesses.