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Amazon Lex – Build Conversational Voice and Text Interfaces

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Re: Amazon Lex – Build Conversational Voice and Text Interfaces

#21

Post by djyaz1200 »

Seems like these chat bots have A LOT of lock in. So the question is which one to pick? This one? IBM Watson? Others? Which horse are you betting on and why?

Amazon making this is great because it's developer friendly and will surely fall in price and improve in quality over time. They also have to make it work well because it's a critical ordering channel for them going forward.

Seems like IBM has been focused on this for years though? Worried they will try to make this a profit center though... rather than continually dropping the price.

Other companies working on this I should be aware of?

Thoughts?

Re: Amazon Lex – Build Conversational Voice and Text Interfaces

#22

Post by hackcrafter »

This is neat but I've been on the lookout for a service that takes speech and responds with speech that you can use in a domain-specific app.

Basically, Alexa as a service?

Is there something out there that does this?

For certain things that require hands-free usage, this would be a killer feature.

ex. a workout-app that tells you your next rep and weight, and you can respond with what weight/reps you did to add to your log!

Re: Amazon Lex – Build Conversational Voice and Text Interfaces

#23

Post by sumsted »

It's great to see the utterence/intent/slot model to be available outside of Alexa. It's been easy to work with so far in Alexa. And you see a similar model from Nuance with Mix, though Mix seems to be stuck in beta.

Lex looks alot like Alexa though the setup flow is a bit different. Also has prompts for each slot needed. That's nice.

Re: Amazon Lex – Build Conversational Voice and Text Interfaces

#24

Post by ronack »

djyaz1200 wrote: post #21

Seems like these chat bots have A LOT of lock in. So the question is which one to pick? This one? IBM Watson? Others? Which horse are you betting on and why? Amazon making this is great because it's developer friendly and will surely fall in price and improve in quality over time. They also have to make it work well because it's a critical ordering channel for them going forward. Seems like IBM has been focused on th…

You're right, lack of standardization and portability is a major problem. I would not personally choose IBM due to the pricing model and previous bad experiences. Google, Microsoft, and Facebook (and a bunch of startups) have all built or acquired conversational services very much like Lex. None of them is a clear winner at this point in my opinion.

Re: Amazon Lex – Build Conversational Voice and Text Interfaces

#25

Post by ronack »

hackcrafter wrote: post #22

This is neat but I've been on the lookout for a service that takes speech and responds with speech that you can use in a domain-specific app. Basically, Alexa as a service? Is there something out there that does this? For certain things that require hands-free usage, this would be a killer feature. ex. a workout-app that tells you your next rep and weight, and you can respond with what weight/reps you did to add to y…

Pairing Lex with Polly should get you there.

https://aws.amazon.com/polly/

Re: Amazon Lex – Build Conversational Voice and Text Interfaces

#26

Post by hackcrafter »

ronack wrote: post #25
hackcrafter wrote: post #22

This is neat but I've been on the lookout for a service that takes speech and responds with speech that you can use in a domain-specific app. Basically, Alexa as a service? Is there something out there that does this? For certain things that require hands-free usage, this would be a killer feature. ex. a workout-app that tells you your next rep and weight, and you can respond with what weight/reps you did to add to y…

Pairing Lex with Polly should get you there. https://aws.amazon.com/polly/

Cool, thanks!

There is some case study at the bottom of the Lex[0] page that had a disconnected "Polly" thing that I didn't' quite get, but that makes sense.

And it looks like Lex takes voice as input, although I don't know if you can put your app into a "always listening for trigger word" mode for truly hands-free operation or not. Will have to play with it.

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/lex/

Re: Amazon Lex – Build Conversational Voice and Text Interfaces

#27

Post by spitfire »

ronack wrote: post #25
hackcrafter wrote: post #22

This is neat but I've been on the lookout for a service that takes speech and responds with speech that you can use in a domain-specific app. Basically, Alexa as a service? Is there something out there that does this? For certain things that require hands-free usage, this would be a killer feature. ex. a workout-app that tells you your next rep and weight, and you can respond with what weight/reps you did to add to y…

Pairing Lex with Polly should get you there. https://aws.amazon.com/polly/

I wish they had a demo of Poly on the site. It's pretty bad to have page after page of text about a voice synthesis service and not have "Click here for demo" above the fold in the first page.

I too, am very interested in a domain specific application of lex+domain knowledge+Poly

Re: Amazon Lex – Build Conversational Voice and Text Interfaces

#28

Post by ranman »

wyldfire wrote: post #10

Are all these Amazon stories from re:Invent? Would it make sense to combine them into a single index today?

If you guys are curious about these announcements I'll be recapping them and going into more detail on twitch.tv/aws at 12:30 pacific

Re: Amazon Lex – Build Conversational Voice and Text Interfaces

#29

Post by jon-wood »

sgwealti wrote: post #14
chishaku wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the best alternatives?

The "Ok Google/Google Now" voice interactivity (or whatever the official name is) on Android phones is much better than Amazon's Alexa/Echo. It actually remembers context from sentence to sentence so you can say "What is the population of Chicago" and it will answer. Then you can say, "How long would it take me to drive there?" And it understands that you are still talking about Chicago. Every interaction with Alexa…

There's nothing about Alexa's API that would prevent doing that, it already has the concept of a conversation and I think we'll see raid improvement in how people make use of that.

Re: Amazon Lex – Build Conversational Voice and Text Interfaces

#30

Post by david927 »

83457 wrote: post #17
david927 wrote: post #7

My daughter, a 6th grader, wants to create a robot that can take voice input and act on it. I think this could be a great place to start.

In intro to comp sci we had an open project using an irobot bot (roomba without vaccum) so my group of some of the more experienced students pieced together a robot dog using a laptop and xbox kinect on top. You could say commands and it would obey such as sit (moves back and stops), rollover (spins), bark (sound from speakers), etc. It would also track a primary user and if you said follow it would stay a certain di…

That sounds great! You should post a video of it.

Personally, I was thinking of something cheaper, such as a Raspberry Pi with a stepper motor.

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