Article by Kartik Kumar: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kartikkum/

• Creating chatbots for the future

On Thursday, September 10 , Melbourne AWS Programming and Tools Meetup organized a workshop Introducing the futuristic AWS Lex which was hosted by Paul Kukiel and Matthew Coles and delivered by Matthew Coles.

In the workshop, we created a mobile application using React Native and AWS Amplify with an embedded Amazon Lex Chatbot.

The workshop included the following steps :

1 – Building your first Amazon Lex chatbot
2 – Building your Web App with Amplify and configuring LEX
3 – Optional – Creating your first call center using Amazon Connect and configuring LEX

What is AWS Lex ?

Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text. Amazon 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”).

With Amazon Lex, you can build bots to increase contact center productivity, automate simple tasks, and drive operational efficiencies across the enterprise. As a fully managed service, Amazon Lex scales automatically, so you don’t need to worry about managing infrastructure.

Why we need AWS Lex ?

The rise of personal assistant chatbots has made this technology a must for all those organizations that offer customer assistance to their users. The tools required to have a personal assistant based on organizations’ need are being moved to the cloud so that the developer can use these tools in their technologies.

How Amazon Lex Is Changing The Technology Landscape?

Artificial intelligence has changed endless things around us and made each contraption keen for their clients. Amazon Lex is an aspect of the Amazon AI administrations. Presently days practically all the associations need their own chatbots so their clients can reach them whenever and from the organization’s end, some will be accessible for guaranteed reaction. Amazon Lex has offered this administration on an exceptionally minimal effort.

The workshop:

The workshop was beautifully delivered by Matt who is the Principal Technical Account Manager at Amazon Web Services, Melbourne.

There were a lot of enthusiastic people joining the workshop making it very interesting as a lot of questions were asked during the event which were answered seamlessly by Matt.

Some of the questions include :

• What is confidence score threshold?
• Sometimes some super common slangs can mean different in different regions

or there are regional way of the same language

When building global application how is Lex going to manage this issue?

The workshop was a do it yourself basis, so the participants were given the link to the GitHub workshop and they did it themselves. Wherever they faced any issue, even the minor issues were resolved by Matt in a matter of seconds.

Everyone was happy with the workshop and left the session knowing that they actually built an actual chatbot in just a matter of minutes/hours.

We would recommend everyone to join workshops organized by Melbourne AWS Programming and Tools Meetup as they not only tell about whats hot in tech at the moment but professionals from the industry design labs which can be done in a matter of minutes to actually build something which you would’ve never imagined either way.

GitHub Link: https://github.com/MattJColes/amazon-lex-amplify-workshop