Amazon launches new artificial intelligence services for developers: Image recognition, text-to-speech, Alexa NLP

Amazon today announced three new artificial intelligence-related toolkits for developers building apps on Amazon Web Services. At the company's AWS re:invent conference in Las Vegas, Amazon showed how developers can use three new services -- Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly, Amazon Rekognition -- to build artificial intelligence features into apps for platforms like Slack, Facebook Messenger, ZenDesk, and others. The idea is to let developers utilize the machine learning algorithms and technology that Amazon has already created for its own processes and services like Alexa. Instead of developing their own AI software, AWS customers can simply use an API call or the AWS Management Console to incorporate AI features into their own apps. AWS CEO Andy Jassy noted that Amazon has been building AI and machine learning technology for 20 years and said that there are now thousands of people "dedicated to AI in our business."