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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

#31

Post by OJFord »

spitfire wrote: post #27
ronack wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

    > 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.
There's a table of demo clips in male/female voices for a few languages at the bottom of the first page.

Re: Amazon Lex – Build Conversational Voice and Text Interfaces

#32

Post by appwiz »

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…

You can add an Amazon Lex bot into a mobile app (Swift, ObjC, Android) using AWS Mobile Hub (https://console.aws.amazon.com/mobilehub/) with a couple of clicks. The apps demonstrate text-to-text and speech-to-speech interaction.

(disclosure: I work for AWS and my team built the Mobile Hub - Lex integration)

Re: Amazon Lex – Build Conversational Voice and Text Interfaces

#33

Post by jp8000 »

chishaku wrote: post #3
dominotw wrote: post #2

>you know how simple, useful, and powerful the Alexa-powered interaction model can be. This is so comical. Alexa is phenomenally bad at conversation, it is so bad that there are almost no successful "apps" built around it despite having an API and app platform. Alexa is decent at single command/action model nothing more than that.

What are the best alternatives?

https://www.ibm.com/watson/developercloud/conversation.html is one.

Re: Amazon Lex – Build Conversational Voice and Text Interfaces

#34

Post by AJ007 »

ronack wrote: post #24
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.

I would prefer to log everything on an owned system and test out bots through third-party APIs. Poking around with options now, but will probably just bootstrap with human operators and pre-canned responses until something makes sense.

It's also worth pointing out there is a huge difference between using the bot for a critical piece of your product vs as a supplement to customer support.

Re: Amazon Lex – Build Conversational Voice and Text Interfaces

#35

Post by olavgg »

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…

I'm working for a startup called Boost.ai where we have decided to build our own deep learning model and create our own training data. We use several models that predicts what word comes next, take care of mispellings and dialects. We also have memory so it can remember contexts when you ask a new question or it predicts that you want to start with a new context.

If you want something kick ass, I highly recommend building it yourself. The bar set by IBM's Watson, Nuance's Nina or IPSoft's Amelia isn't actually very high. For non english languages, anyone who has some knowledge about NLP and deep learning will easily surpass them.

Re: Amazon Lex – Build Conversational Voice and Text Interfaces

#36

Post by madeofpalk »

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.

It's bonkers to believe that this is actually possible for a 6th grader (with maybe a little bit of help) now.

Just over 10 years ago when I was a 6th grader I wanted to do this, but I was out of luck. There were barely any products out that had 'conversational interfaces', let alone the commoditisation to enable just about anyone to do it as a hobby.

Re: Amazon Lex – Build Conversational Voice and Text Interfaces

#37

Post by Qworg »

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…

Microsoft has their Bot Framework + LUIS. I've found both to be easy to work with.

Disclosure: I work at Microsoft AI and Research.

Re: Amazon Lex – Build Conversational Voice and Text Interfaces

#39

Post by mtthwmtthw »

Are there any open source project like this? I would imagine it's a machine learning model to match intent and then a custom NER that extracts slots. I'm sure the actual models are pretrained on lots of data, and the process is probably a lot more complex. Given the abundance of vendors in this space, it has to at least be a possibility .

Re: Amazon Lex – Build Conversational Voice and Text Interfaces

#40

Post by flukus »

madeofpalk wrote: post #36
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.

It's bonkers to believe that this is actually possible for a 6th grader (with maybe a little bit of help) now. Just over 10 years ago when I was a 6th grader I wanted to do this, but I was out of luck. There were barely any products out that had 'conversational interfaces', let alone the commoditisation to enable just about anyone to do it as a hobby.

I think all the tools were there (though not necessarily the compute power). What was missing for me (20 years ago) was the guidance to find these sorts of possibilities. Parents and teachers were no help and there was no google to find the right geocities pages. I wish I'd known about linux and all the free oss tools much earlier.
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