

While the chatbot becomes our interface, we can interact with that chatbot over a number of different channels using (almost) turn key integrations into Amazon Lex. However, the metaphor of the interface is pretty apt here, as we are still essentially inputing data by talking or typing and getting data back from some backend service. With a chatbot, or conversational interface, we can allow people to arrive at those ends using natural language instead of an interface that I might construct out of buttons and form fields. At the end of the day, most of us don’t talk or write just for our own enjoyment, we do so to produce results, get information, or make something happen. Amazon bills its Lex service as “a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text.”Īnd this is a pretty good way of thinking about what a chatbot really is, an interface. What is a Chatbot?įirst, let’s get this definition out of the way.

For our demo example, we need a single intent “ OrderBook”. Amazon Lex builds a language model based on utterance phrases provided by us, which then invoke the required intent. If we have more than one intent, we need to provide different utterances for them.

Utterances: An utterance is a text phrase that invokes intent.In our case, our goal is to purchase books. Intent: Intent represents a goal, needed to be achieved by the bot’s user.Lex-Related Terminologiesīot: It consists of all the components related to a conversation, which includes: To understand the terms correctly, let’s consider an e-commerce bot that supports conversations involving the purchase of books. I’ve put together this quick-start tutorial using which you can start building Lex chat-bots.
#Amazon chatbot code#
After publishing the bot, Lex will process the text or voice conversations and execute the code to send responses. The phrases provided by the developer are used to build the natural language model. Now, developers just need to design conversations according to their requirements in Lex console. So, now there is no need to spend time in setting up and managing the infrastructure for your bots. Amazon now provides it as a service that allows developers to take advantage of the same features used by Amazon Alexa. It provides deep learning-powered natural-language understanding along with automatic speech recognition. Lex is effectively the technology used by Alexa, Amazon’s voice-activated virtual assistant which lets people control things with voice commands such as playing music, setting alarm, ordering groceries, etc. Amazon announced “ Amazon Lex” in December 2016 and since then we’ve been using it to build bots for our customers.
