Organizations use messaging platforms like Slack to bring the right people together to securely communicate with each other and collaborate to get work done. A Slack workspace captures invaluable organizational knowledge in the form of the information that flows through it as the users collaborate. However, making this knowledge easily and securely available to users is challenging due to the fragmented structure of Slack workspaces. Additionally, the conversational nature of Slack communication renders a traditional keyword-based approach to search ineffective. You can now use the Amazon Kendra Slack connector to index Slack messages and documents, and search this content using intelligent search in Amazon Kendra, powered by machine learning (ML).

When you deploy intelligent search in your organization, two important factors to consider are access to the latest and most comprehensive information, and a contextual discovery mechanism. Many companies are still struggling to make their internal documents searchable in a way that allows employees to get relevant information knowledge in a scalable, cost-effective manner. A 2018 International Data Corporation (IDC) study found that data professionals are losing 50% of their time every week--30% searching for, governing, and preparing data, plus 20% duplicating work. Amazon Kendra is purpose-built for addressing these challenges. Amazon Kendra is an intelligent search service that uses deep learning and reading comprehension to deliver more accurate search results.

Today, Microsoft announced a series of artificial intelligence-driven features for its Bing search engine to make it more conversational and nuanced. The news, unveiled at an event in San Francisco, means that Bing will make better use of object recognition, so-called machine reading (for parsing text and extracting meaning), and other techniques tuned and improved using AI training methods. Search results will now show both multiple perspectives and multiple sources, culled from a list of pre-approved news sources, to show Bing users different sides of issues ranging from the benefits and downsides of kale to the pros and cons of contentious political issues. This builds on an earlier feature, announced back in September, in which Bing added fact checks to search results in an effort to cut down on misinformation, fake news, and other distorted stories from manipulative information sources. In a new partnership with social news site Reddit, Bing will also surface information from subreddits right in search results by using algorithms to read and analyze the user-generated text across Reddit's many communities. The integration includes AMA questions and answers populated within the search card for popular celebrities, AskReddit-sourced answers to broad service questions, and top threads for specific subreddits that will show up in search results just by searching the name of the community.

With cloud-based, self-learning search, all the required components are hosted and managed by the vendor, such as Coveo. Because of its scalability, it has the potential to change the customer service industry the same way machine learning has impacted e-commerce and social networks. In the past, the high cost of using and managing machine learning systems meant that machine learning was rarely used for traditional enterprise search or self-service support sites. The cloud makes that affordable to all customers and to all departments, especially when deploying self-learning search on self-service support sites and on communities, because of its ability to scale and handle large volumes of data.

The company already uses machine learning in Search and other products like Translate -- and the VP of search John Giannandrea is, in fact, a leading AI researcher. Just recently, for instance, the company launched Assistant, a version of Google Now that you can actually converse with. This is the first time we've seen intelligent search working across so many apps, however. For employees drowning in files, it should help them sort out their stuff -- as Google App VP Prabhakar Raghavan puts it, "today the average knowledge worker spends the equivalent of one full day a week searching for and gathering information." Google also rebuilt Sites, an app that lets corporate users share internal documents like newsletters or account reports.