AWS re:Invent 2017

Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for developers to add speech to text capability to their applications. The ASR service can be used across a breadth of industries. For example, customer contact centers can convert call recordings into text for further analysis of what drives positive outcomes; media content producers can automate subtitling workflows for greater reach, and marketers and advertisers can enhance content discovery and display more targeted advertising based on the extracted metadata.

This planet is a big place filled with amazing and unusual things. Understanding every object, location, and action on this pale blue dot is an enormous challenge. As the world's leading provider of high-resolution Earth imagery, data, and analysis, DigitalGlobe faces this challenge every day. They use automatic computer vision and machine learning where possible, but so far, the only true solution requires the most powerful information processing machine we know: the human brain. Scaling this solution to work on the trillions of satellite pixels collected by DigitalGlobe every day requires thousands of brains, all working in harmony. To address this, DigitalGlobe | Radiant's (now Radiant Solutions) Tomnod service uses Amazon Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing internet platform, to identify small objects appearing in large areas of new satellite imagery. Tomnod is heavily used for commercial and humanitarian purposes. In this session, you hear how Radiant Solutions uses crowdsourcing to help solve large-scale computer vision and machine learning problems.

Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text, and Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech. This session combines both of these AWS services during which the presenter will demonstrate how to build a Help Desk chatbot that feature spoken-voice interfaces. Attendees will be provided with the foundational skills for those looking to enrich their applications with natural, conversational interfaces.  Liberty Mutual Insurance will also present on their chat platform architecture to demonstrated how they areusing Amazon Lex in their organization as an employee digital assistant.

In this session, you will learn best practices for implementing simple to advanced AI/ML use cases on AWS. First. we will review the decision points for using democratised services such as Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly and integration with services such as Amazon Connect. Then we will look at real use cases, optimising the customer experience with chatbots, streamlining the customer experience predicting responses with Amazon Connect. Finally, we will dive deep into the most common of these patterns and cover design and implementation considerations. By the end of the session you will understand how to use Amazon Lex to optimise the user experience, through different user interactions.

Developing deep learning applications just got even simpler and faster. In this session, you will learn how to program deep learning models using Gluon, the new intuitive, dynamic programming interface available for the Apache MXNet open-source framework. We'll also explore neural network architectures such as multi-layer perceptrons, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and LSTMs.

In this session, Reza Zadeh, CEO of Matroid, presents a Kubernetes deployment on Amazon Web Services that provides customized computer vision to a large number of users. Reza offers an overview of Matroid's pipeline and demonstrates how to customize computer vision neural network models in the browser, followed by building, training, and visualizing TensorFlow models, which are provided at scale to monitor video streams.

Motion detection triggers have reduced the amount of video recorded by modern devices. But maybe you want to reduce that further—maybe you only care if a car or a person is on-camera before recording or sending a notification. Security cameras and smart doorbells can use Amazon Rekognition to reduce the number of false alarms. Learn how device makers and home enthusiasts are building their own smart layers of person and car detection to reduce false alarms and limit video volume. Learn too how you can use face detection and recognition to notify you when a friend has arrived.

Although there are many ways to optimize the speech generated by Amazon Polly's text-to-speech voices, you might find it challenging to apply the most effective enhancements in each situation. Learn how you can control pronunciation, intonation, and timing for text-to-speech voices. In this session, you get a comprehensive overview of the available tools and methods available for modifying Amazon Polly speech output, including SSML tags, lexicons, and punctuation. You also get recommendations for streamlining application of these techniques. Come away with insider tips on the best speech optimization techniques to provide a more natural voice experience.

Enterprises must transform at the pace of technology. Through chatbots built with Amazon Lex, enterprises are improving business productivity, reducing execution time, and taking advantage of efficiency savings for common operational requests. These include inventory management, human resources requests, self-service analytics, and even the onboarding of new employees.  In this session, learn how Infor integrated Amazon Lex into their standard technology stack, with several use cases based on advisory, assistant, and automation roles deeply rooted in their expanding AI strategy. This strategy powers one of the major functionalities of Infor Coleman to enable their users to make business decisions more quickly.

In this session, discover how to build a multichannel conversational interface that leverages a preprocessing layer in front of Amazon Lex. This preprocessing layer can enable customers to integrate their conversational interface with external services and use multiple specialized Amazon Lex chatbots as part of an overall solution. As an example of how to integrate with an external service, learn how to integrate with Skype. Watch it in action through a chatbot demonstration with interaction through Skype messaging and voice.