Amazon AWS – Brain game
Amazon is stepping up its efforts in the coming battle of the brains.
Amazon AWS – Brain game
Posted on December 2, 2016
Amazon is stepping up its efforts in the coming battle of the brains.
Amazon is following its competitors by announcing a series of services based on its AI research but the performance of Echo makes me think that there is still an awful lot of work to do.
The headline of the AWS re:invent conference was the launch of three new services based on the AI work that it has done to date.
First: Amazon Recoknition.
This is a service that provides image and facial recognition as well as being able to assess the mood of the subject as well as detect glasses and so on.
Second: Amazon Polly.
This is a text to speech service that takes text input and returns an MP3 stream that sounds like a real conversation rather than a mechanical expression of just words.
Amazon Lex
This is a service that provides natural language understanding and automatic speech recognition.
It is also the system that powers the speech recognition of the Alexa digital assistant in this regard it performs reasonably well.
It is in Alexa’s ability to understand context, multi part enquiries and respond to enquiries that it falls short.
These launches have also gone hand in hand with a new initiative with Intel where Intel will launch a reference design for a home speaker that includes the Alexa digital assistant.
This is a good idea because at this early stage all the digital assistants need to collect as much data as possible in order to improve.
Hence, we expect that there will be a slew of devices that use Alexa for their brain with a range of designs, capabilities and price points.
I would not be surprised to see Google follow suit in this strategy with Google Assistant where, once again, it will have the advantage.
This is because we have long believed that Google Assistant is vastly superior to anything else in terms if the user experience that it offers and the usefulness of its responses.
Consequently, if Google executes well and users like its product, it should be able to encourage manufacturers to deploy its digital assistant rather than Amazon’s.
Once again Google’s success (just like Pixel) is hinging on execution and only time will tell whether the recent re-organisation has been successful in solving Google’s historical problems in this area.
I continue to think that Alphabet is pricing in success in most of its endeavours and so prefer Microsoft, Tencent and Baidu from an investment perspective.
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