AWS AI Services-1: What are Artificial Intelligence (AI) and AWS AI Services?

9 min readNov 6, 2023

We will learn detailed information about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and AWS AI Services in this article. Next, we will implement practical use cases for Amazon Rekognition, and then create Smart ChatBot by using Amazon Lex in this series of articles. We will do them practically and step by step.

Topics we will cover:

1. What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)

2. What are AWS Artificial Intelligence (AI) Services

3. As a result

4. Next post: “AWS AI Services-2: Hands-on Use Cases for Amazon Rekognition”

5. References

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1. What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a set of technologies that enable computers to perform a variety of advanced functions, including the ability to see, understand and translate spoken and written language, analyze data, make recommendations, and more (1-a). It’s the capability of a computer system to mimic human-like cognitive functions such as learning and problem-solving (1-b).

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the field of computer science dedicated to solving cognitive problems commonly associated with human intelligence, such as learning, creation, and image recognition. Modern organizations collect large volumes of data from diverse sources like smart sensors, human-generated content, monitoring tools, and system logs. The goal of AI is to create self-learning systems that derive meaning from data. Then, AI can apply that knowledge to solve new problems in human-like ways. For example, AI technology can respond meaningfully to human conversations, create original images and text, and make decisions based on real-time data inputs. (1-c)

Artificial intelligence is impacting the way in which enterprises engage with consumers. Artificial Intelligence covers many technologies such as Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, robotics, virtual assistants, and more, as shown in Figure 1 (2). Our organization can integrate AI capabilities into our applications to optimize business processes, improve customer experiences, and accelerate innovation.

Also, Artificial Intelligence as a Service (AIaaS) is the third-party offering of artificial intelligence (AI) outsourcing. It enables individuals and companies to experiment with AI for various purposes without a large initial investment and with lower risk. (3)

Artificial intelligence and cloud computing are two of the most influential technologies in the current technological landscape. With the help of these technologies, industries like IT, telecom, consumer electronics, etc., have entirely revolutionized their way of operations. If you combine both of these technologies, businesses can benefit greatly by boosting their operations’ speed, accuracy, and efficiency. Moreover, as the market of AI is surging toward $1.3 trillion by 2030, the potential of AI on the cloud is unquestionable. (4)

2. What are AWS Artificial Intelligence (AI) Services

AWS provides AI services to businesses like healthcare, IT, telecom, manufacturing, etc. Also, AI Services on AWS don’t require machine learning experience.

We can classify the Artificial Intelligence Services on AWS as follows: (5)

2. a. Computer vision

Amazon Rekognition (Analyze images and videos)
Amazon Rekognition offers pre-trained and customizable computer vision (CV) capabilities to extract information and insights from your images and videos. Also, it catalogs assets, automates workflows, and extracts meaning from your media and applications. (6)

Amazon Lookout for Vision (Detect defects and automate inspection)
Amazon Lookout for Vision is a machine learning (ML) service that spots anomalies in images so manufacturing companies can detect defects at scale. Also, it identifies missing product components, vehicle and structure damage, and irregularities for comprehensive quality control. (7)

AWS Panorama (Utilize computer vision at the edge)
It is allowing organizations to bring computer vision (CV) to their on-premises cameras to make automated predictions with high accuracy and low latency. Also, it finds visual defects in industrial products, accurately and at scale. It can process images from IP cameras, in batch, or in real-time. It identifies and reports visual anomalies (like dents, cracks, and scratches) in a dashboard so you can take action quickly to stop more defects from occurring, it increases production quality and reduces costs. (8)

2. b. Automated data extraction and analysis

Amazon Textract (Extract text and data)
It automatically extracts text, handwriting, layout elements, and data from scanned documents. It goes beyond simple optical character recognition (OCR) to identify, understand, and extract specific data from documents. Also, it pulls valuable information from millions of documents at speed. (9)

Amazon Comprehend (Acquire insights)
It is a natural-language processing (NLP) service that uses machine learning to uncover valuable insights and connections in text. It maximizes the value of unstructured text with natural language processing (NLP). It develops insights by recognizing the entities, key phrases, language, sentiments, and other common elements in a document. (10)

Amazon Augmented AI (Amazon A2I) (Control quality)
It is a fully managed service that makes it easier to incorporate developer reviews of ML predictions, removing the need to build human review systems or manage large numbers of human analysts. It adds humans to the review process to ensure the accuracy and compliance of sensitive data. (11)

2. c. Language AI

Amazon Lex (Build chatbots & virtual agents)
It is a deep-learning chatbot service. It creates automated conversation channels to improve customer service. (12)

Amazon Transcribe (Automate speech recognition)
It is an automatic speech recognition service that uses machine learning models to convert audio to text. You can use Amazon Transcribe as a standalone transcription service or add speech-to-text capabilities to any application. It enhances your applications and workflows with automatic speech recognition. (13)

Amazon Polly (Give your apps a voice)
It uses deep learning technologies to synthesize natural-sounding human speech, so you can convert articles to speech. With dozens of lifelike voices across a broad set of languages, we can use Amazon Polly to build speech-activated applications. It converts text into lifelike speech. Amazon Polly supports multiple languages and includes a variety of lifelike voices, so we can build speech-enabled applications that work in multiple locations and use the ideal voice for your customers. (14)

2. d. Improve customer experience

Amazon Kendra (Find accurate information faster)
It is an intelligent search service that uses natural language processing and advanced machine learning algorithms to return specific answers to search questions from your data. It is an intelligent enterprise search service that helps you search across different content repositories with built-in connectors. It enhances websites and applications with natural language speech to help users quickly search for what they need. (15)

Amazon Personalize (Personalize online experiences)
It is a fully managed machine learning service that uses your data to generate item recommendations for your users. It uses ML to customize applications and websites for each individual user. (16)

Amazon Translate (Engage audiences in every language)
It is a text translation service that uses advanced machine learning technologies to provide high-quality translation on demand. We can use it to translate unstructured text documents or to build applications that work in multiple languages. It expands our reach and accessibility with fast, accurate, and customizable translation. (17)

2. e. Business metrics

Amazon Forecast (Forecast business metrics)
It is a time-series forecasting service based on machine learning (ML) and built for business metrics analysis. It harnesses unique data types and time series data to create accurate end-to-end prediction models. (18)

Amazon Fraud Detector (Detect online fraud)
It is a fully managed fraud detection service that automates the detection of potentially fraudulent activities online. It stops adversaries and identifies potential attacks with technology honed through years of use on Amazon.com. (19)

Amazon Lookout for Metrics (Identify data anomalies)
It is a service that finds anomalies in your data, determines their root causes, and enables you to take action quickly. It detects and identifies root causes of unexpected changes in metrics such as revenue and retention. (20)

2. f. Code and DevOps

Amazon DevOps Guru (Improve application availability)
It is a service powered by machine learning (ML) that gives you a simpler way to measure and improve an application’s operational performance and availability and reduce expensive downtime — no machine learning expertise is required. It applies machine learning to analyze your operational data and application metrics and events to identify behaviors that deviate from normal operating patterns. You are notified when it detects an operational issue or risk. Thus, it simplifies operational performance measurement and reduces application downtime. (21)

Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer (Automated code reviews)
It uses program analysis and machine learning to detect potential defects that are difficult for developers to find and offers suggestions for improving your Java and Python code. This service has been released for general availability in several Regions. It detects bugs and assesses critical issues and vulnerabilities quickly for higher-quality code. (22)

Amazon CodeGuru Profiler (Eliminate costly inefficient code)
It collects runtime performance data from your live applications, and provides recommendations that can help you fine-tune your application performance. It uses runtime behavior analysis to improve application performance and decrease compute costs. (23)

2. g. Industrial AI

Amazon Lookout for Equipment (Detect abnormal machine conditions)
It monitors industrial equipment to detect abnormal equipment behavior. It automatically detects abnormal machine conditions by analyzing sensor data. (24)

Amazon Monitron (Predictive maintenance)
Amazon Monitron includes purpose-built sensors to capture vibration and temperature data, and gateways to automatically transfer data to the AWS Cloud. It is an end-to-end predictive maintenance system that includes sensors, a gateway, an anomaly detection service, and an end-user application. (25)

2. h. Healthcare

Amazon HealthLake (Store and analyze health data)
It is a HIPAA eligible service for clinical data ingestion, storage, and analysis utilizing the Healthcare Interoperability FHIR (R4) specification. It securely stores, transfers, queries, and analyzes health data to offer a complete view of a patient’s medical history. (26)

Amazon Comprehend Medical (Extract health data)
It is a HIPAA-eligible natural language processing (NLP) service that uses machine learning that has been pre-trained to understand and extract health data from medical text, such as prescriptions, procedures, or diagnoses. It detects and returns useful information in unstructured clinical text such as physician’s notes, discharge summaries, test results, and case notes. It extracts information from unstructured medical text accurately and quickly. (27)

3. As a result

We learned detailed information about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and AWS AI Services in this article.

If you want to learn information about Azure Cloud AI Services click on the link, as shown in Figure-2.

If you want to learn information about Google Cloud AI Services click on the link, as shown in Figure-3.

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4. Next post

In the next post, “AWS AI Services-2: Hands-on use cases for Amazon Rekognition”, as shown in Figure 4. We will learn detailed information about Amazon Rekognition. Then, we will implement practical use cases for Amazon Rekognition; “Facial Analysis”, “Face Comparison”, “Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) Detection”, “Detect Labels From Image”, “Celebrity Recognition”, and “Text in Image (detecting vehicle plate information)”. We will do them practically and step by step.