Dive Brief:

• Amazon Web Services is launching three artificial intelligence tools – Amazon Lex, the technology behind Amazon’s digital assistant Alexa; Amazon Polly which turns text into speech; and Amazon Rekognition which uses image and facial recognition to add image analysis to applications per a company press release.
• The AI tools allow developers to include the tech in apps with fully managed services precluding the need for building deep learning algorithms, training machine learning models and not requiring up-front commitments or infrastructure investments.
• Amazon AI clients include: Capital One, Motorola Solutions, SmugMug, American Heart Association, NASA, HubSpot, Redfin, Ohio Health, DuoLingo, Royal National Institute of Blind People, LingApps, GoAnimate, and Coursera

Dive Insight:

Amazon Web Services has become a serious player in the cloud space and now the company is combining its AI R&D, including the tech behind Alexa, with its existing set of services. Alexa and related products like Echo are a big hit for Amazon and brand interest in AI more broadly is growing. As result, Amazon's news has the potential to attract a number of marketers and further bolster Alexa, which is already giving Google Home and other digital home assistants a run for their money. 

The move comes at a time when AI tech is being rolled out by a number of tech giants. In September Salesforce announced Einstein, its AI tech that was created to become a core element of its technology suite including the flagship CRM solution and Salesforce Marketing Cloud. That same month Microsoft announced a new AI group including Microsoft Research, its Information Platform Group, Bing and Cortana product groups, and its Ambient Computing and Robotics teams that will involve more than 5,000 computer scientists and engineers across its entire enterprise.

Tech vendors are bringing AI to businesses in general with many applications that will directly impact marketers. And deployments like Saleforce and Amazon’s are designed to put the technology “under the hood” so to speak to allow users access to powerful tech tools without requiring specialized training.