Amazon Lex and the possibilities it holds for Enterprises

Amazon Lex is an AWS solution that allows developers to publish voice or chat bots for use across different mobile, web and chat platforms. It can listen, understand user intent, and respond to context. Powered by deep learning functionalities like automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language processing (NLU), Lex is also the technology behind Alexa devices. Available now in the open, it can be easily leveraged by enterprises to build their own digital assistants.

Amazon Lex for Enterprises

For enterprises, Lex-powered applications can become a key competitive advantage, allowing them to optimize processes and enable cost savings. A few key aspects where Amazon Lex can assist are:

Performing User-based Applications

Lex can help build bots capable of providing information, or addressing user requests and queries. It can perform applications like ordering food, booking tickets, and accessing bank account.

Made possible with the help of the ARS and NLU, these capabilities can help create powerful interfaces customer-facing mobile applications. Such a voice or text chat interface on mobile devices can help users perform tasks that involve a series of steps played out in a conversational format. Further, the integration of Lex with Amazon Cognito helps developers control user management, authentication, and sync across all devices.

For example, healthcare enterprises can enable patients to schedule appointments at their facility with Lex powered bots. The patient can send a text request via his mobile application for “an appointment on Monday”.

• Amazon Lex will recognize that an appointment has been requested, and will ask the user for a “preferred time on Monday”.
• The user responds with a text, say, “1 pm”.
• Lex will reserve this appointment time for the user once the account information is retrieved.
• It will further notify the patient that “an appointment time of 1 pm has been finalised on Monday”.

Similarly, tasks like opening bank accounts, ordering food, or finding the right dress at a retail store can all be accomplished via Lex-powered bots.

Enabling Device Interactions

Lex also helps you build highly interactive and conversational user experiences for connected devices ranging from vehicles, to wearables, and other appliances.

For example, a wearables company can have Lex powered bots installed on its products for providing information like day, date and weather. So when the user makes a request like, “temperature in California”, Amazon Lex on the device recognizes it and responds in an appropriate manner.

• It can further inquire, “Celsius or Fahrenheit?” 
• And on receiving an answer “Celsius”, it will retrieve the information with the help of other AWS services involved

This ability to imbibe everyday accessories with an intelligent digital assistant allows brands to always exist in their customers immediate environment. And that means an exponential rise in brands recall and customer retention.

Enhancing Enterprise Productivity

Whether it is checking your sales data from Salesforce, marketing performance from HubSpot, or customer service status from Zendesk, you can do it all and more, directly with your chatbots. Lex enables you to build bots that connect to a variety of such enterprise productivity tools via AWS Lambda functions.

So, if an employee wants to access the “sales numbers for the month of December”, he can simply ask the bot on his system. Lex will recognize this as a request, and pull data from relevant enterprise systems like Salesforce or proprietary BI dashboards. Once the data is received, it will deliver it to the executive on his device and platform of choice.

This helps enterprises streamline their operations, and improve organizational productivity. 

Benefits of Deploying Lex for Your Enterprise

Ease of usage: Amazon Lex lets you build your own bot in minutes, no deep learning expertise required. Once you have the basic objective of the bot mapped out, you can specify the conversation flow, and Lex will build a natural language model to ask and respond to user queries.

Seamless deployment and integration: A Lex powered bot has native interoperability with other AWS services like Cognito, Lambda, and CloudWatch. It can scale automatically, and you need not worry about provisioning hardware or managing infrastructure to power your bot experience.

High quality ASR and NLU: Lex enables your bots to understand the intent behind the input. It can then subsequently fulfil the user intent by invoking the appropriate response.

Multi-turn conversations: With the help of Lex, you can build multi-turn conversations for your bots. This means that once an intent has been identified, users will be prompted a series of next questions to extract the required information needed for giving the right answer. For example, if “book hotel” is the intent, the user is prompted for the location, check-in date, number of nights, etc.

Cost effectiveness - Amazon Lex has no upfront costs or minimum fees. With a pay-as-you-go model, users are charged only for the text or speech requests made. And with the Amazon Lex free tier, you can try it without any initial investment.

How Srijan can Help

AWS has a broad range of AI and Deep Learning solutions to help enterprises build and deploy intelligent products and services. But you also need a skilled team that can evaluate your business requirements, and choose the right AWS deep learning solutions that fit the bill. That’s where Srijan teams get into the game.

Srijan teams are adept at leveraging Amazon Lex to deliver a range of services:

• Chatbots built for one of the largest cleaning solutions enterprises, to help them reduce operational costs and increase productivity
• Building JIRA Assist, an Alexa skill that helps manage tasks on the project management tool, JIRA, via voice commands
• Several powerful bot POCs in collaboration with AWS