Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text. Lex provides the advanced deep learning functionalities of automatic speech recognition (ASR) for converting speech to text, and natural language understanding (NLU) to recognize the intent of the text, to enable you to build applications with highly engaging user experiences and lifelike conversational interactions. With Amazon Lex, the same deep learning technologies that power Amazon Alexa are now available to any developer, enabling you to quickly and easily build sophisticated, natural language, conversational bots (“chatbots”). 

Amazon EC2 C5 instances are the most powerful Compute Optimized instances and the best price to compute performance in EC2. C5 is the first AWS cloud instance based on Intel’s next-generation Skylake Xeon® processors. They are ideal for compute-intensive workloads like ad serving, scientific modeling, 3D rendering, cluster computing, machine learning inference, and distributed analytics.

AWS Snowmobile is an exabyte-scale data transfer service that can move extremely large amounts of data to AWS in a fast, secure, and cost-effective manner. You can transfer up to 100PB per Snowmobile, a 45-foot long ruggedized shipping container, pulled by a semi-trailer truck. Snowmobile makes it easy to move massive volumes of data to the cloud, including video libraries, image repositories, or even a complete data center migration. All data is encrypted with 256-bit encryption and you can manage your encryption keys with AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS). Snowmobile includes GPS tracking, alarm monitoring, 24/7 video surveillance and an optional escort security vehicle while in transit. 

AWS Snowball Edge is a 100TB data transfer device with on-board storage and compute. You can use Snowball Edge to move large amounts of data into and out of AWS, as a temporary storage tier for large local data sets, or to support independent local workloads in remote locations. 

Today, we are pleased to announce that Amazon CloudFront has added a new type of edge location called Regional Edge Cache that further improves performance for your viewers. Regional Edge Caches, in addition to improving performance, also help reduce the load on your origin resources, minimizing operational burden associated with scaling your origin and reducing your origin costs.  Regional Edge Caches are turned on by default for your CloudFront distributions; you do not need to make any changes to your distributions to take advantage of this feature. There are also no additional charges to use this feature.

Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech. Polly lets you create applications that talk, enabling you to build entirely new categories of speech-enabled products. Polly is an Amazon AI service that uses advanced deep learning technologies to synthesize speech that sounds like a human voice. Polly includes 47 lifelike voices spread across 24 languages, so you can select the ideal voice and build speech-enabled applications that work in many different countries. With Polly, you only pay for the number of characters you convert to speech, and you can save and replay Polly’s generated speech. Polly’s low cost per character converted, and lack of restrictions on storage and reuse of voice output, make it a cost-effective way to enable Text-to-Speech everywhere.

AWS Mobile Hub now includes an integration with Amazon Lex, so you can build mobile apps that use speech and text, in addition to touch to your mobile app. This lets you use the technology that powers Amazon Alexa to create engaging speech- and text-based conversational bots in your own app. Each bot you create with Mobile Hub uses Amazon Lex to recognize the intent of natural language input and triggers appropriate business functions. You can create engaging conversational experiences for common app scenarios such as booking tickets, ordering products, logging tickets with customer support, querying an internal IT helpdesk system, and more.

Amazon Rekognition is a service that makes it easy to add image analysis to your applications. With Rekognition, you can detect objects, scenes, and faces in images. You can also search and compare faces. Rekognition’s API lets you easily build powerful visual search and discovery into your applications. With Amazon Rekognition, you only pay for the images you analyze and the face metadata you store. There are no minimum fees and there are no upfront commitments.

One of the attractive ways in which the world is trending is that many people can work from anywhere. A number of organisations have sprung up to provide working sites in exotic locations. Hubud provides an environment in Bali with desks and fast Internet and help with accommodation and transport and local requirements. Or there’s …

Read full article: Working In Shangri-La

Touch control moves into mid-air gesture control with tactile feedback. Bastien Beauvois describes some of the techniques for designing haptic touch interfaces.

Read full article: In the air gesture control gets haptic feedback