Recently, Amazon Web Services unveiled new features for three of its artificial intelligence services – the multi-language transcription service Amazon Transcribe, the real-time translation service Amazon Translate, and the text-to-speech service Amazon Polly.
The capabilities follow some similar announcements that were recently made, all of which happened before the yearly AWS re:Invent conference.
The 2017 re: Invent conference provided a platform for rolling out an array of new services, with most of them bringing clients new machine learning features –Amazon Transcribe and Amazon Translate.
Machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) are fast shifting from a competitive edge in the cloud in a bid to table stakes.
As such, it allows AWS to boost its services prior to the 2018 conference.
Amazon is revealing support for distinct accents, 14 new languages and voices, specifically across the entire machine learning capabilities including Transcribe, Polly and Translate.
Currently, Amazon Polly clients can access new voices for Both Castilian Italian and Spanish, as well as one of the latest Mexican Spanish voice.
This propels the Amazon Polly’s collection to 57 voices spread out across 28 languages.
What’s more, Polly leverages deep learning in the synthesizing of both sound and speech in a way that is similar to a human voice.
According to Amazon, clients can incorporate it into their apps without any machine learning expertise.
For the time being, Amazon Translate clients have gained access to new languages such as Indonesian, Korean, Polish, Dutch, Hebrew, Danish, Swedish, and Finnish.
At the moment, the neural machine translation service supports not only 417 translation combinations but also 21 languages.
For Amazon Transcribe, clients now have access to new accents such as Canadian French, Australian English, and British English.
As such, the automatic speech recognition (ASR) service allows developers to include a speech-to-text feature to their apps.
Amazon is also now incorporating streaming transcription to Amazon Transcribe to not only help users in passing a live audio stream, particularly to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) but also get text transcripts in real-time.
The new capability could apply to a wide array of industries and use cases, including call centers, finance, media, or courtroom record keeping.
A call center, for instance, could utilize it in detecting keywords, especially in a streaming transcript in a bid to prompt certain actions such as calling for a supervisor.
In the meantime, Amazon has upgraded Amazon Comprehend, which is a natural language processing (NLP) service that utilizes machine learning in classifying text.
Comprehend is another Amazon service that was unveiled at the 2017 re: Invent, which now includes Portuguese, Italian, German and French support.
What’s more, Amazon has grown the service in a bid to not only spot natural language but also categorize text that is specialized to a client’s industry, team or even business.
At the beginning of this month, Amazon made several of its top services, including Transcribe, Comprehend and Translate to be more accessible in the healthcare industry through ensuring that they are HIPAA-eligible.
HIPAA entails the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996.
