Amazon Helps The World Build Better Bots

The race to voice-activated software is on.

This week, Amazon announced it’s rolling out the technology behind its voice assistant Alexa. With this information, developers have the power to build chat features directly into their current and future applications. Dubbed Amazon Lex, this offering was initially in its preview stage in Q4 of 2016.

In an effort to compete with Apple and Alphabet Inc’s Google, Amazon is hoping this move will expedite the process of expanding its voice-powered technology. Through processing large quantities of data in Amazon Lex, the artificial intelligence at the core of Alexa will be enhanced at a rapid level. For developers looking to use this offering, Amazon will be charging based on text and voice requests processed by Lex.

Amazon’s CTO, Werner Vogels commented on this new offering to developers at Amazon’s cloud-computing summit: “There’s massive acceleration happening here. The cool thing about having this running as a service in the cloud instead of in your own data center or on your own desktop is that we can make Lex better continuously by the millions of customers that are using it.”