Amazon Unveils Artificial Intelligence Products for Cloud

Amazon introduced an image recognition program, a speech-to-text service dubbed Polly, and tools for building conversational apps, highlighting its push to add artificial intelligence to its cloud-computer offerings, according to Bloomberg.

Andy Jassy, chief executive officer of the Amazon Web Services unit, unveiled the new products at the company’s fifth annual re:Invent conference, which drew 32,000 people from diverse industries to Las Vegas. He pitched Amazon’s wide breadth of services and ability to customize them for clients, while poking fun at Oracle, which Amazon dismisses as a cloud pretender.

The event attracted people from financial services, health care, gaming and other industries interested in learning more about how to use cloud computing, and let Amazon flex its muscles as a market leader in the fast-growing industry. Public cloud spending is expected to increase almost 17 percent to $204 billion this year, according to researcher Gartner.

Amazon is trying to maintain its lead over Microsoft, Google, IBM and Oracle as more companies transition from using their servers to renting computing power and data space hosted remotely, which they access via the internet. Movie-service Netflix is a prominent example of a web company powered by Amazon Web Services. Capital One announced it would transition more of its data to Amazon, highlighting growing interest of the financial sector in the speed and flexibility of cloud computing.

In the third quarter, Amazon had about 45 percent of the market for infrastructure as a service, where companies buy basic computing and storage power from the cloud, according to Synergy Research Group. Amazon’s revenue is more than twice that of the next three players combined, Synergy said.