Amazon recently announced over 100 new cloud services and products at the latest re:Invent conference. While there are tons to be excited about, there are four cloud services that we look forward to using in future projects. Most we’ve had to build from scratch at some point or have had clients ask for them only to be disappointed in the high cost of development. All four services introduce easier ways to integrate machine learning into your cloud based software or mobile application, without significant added cost.
Amazon Personalize
When shopping on Amazon.com, have you noticed the recommendations based on your latest purchases? That’s all created by a recommendation engine that is based on things you like, and things other people like you have purchased too. Amazon is now making similar recommendation models available to developers. Imagine you have an app, like CurEat, that curates local restaurants and lists. You can now make more personalized recommendations using Amazon Personalize instead of developing something from the ground up.
Amazon Forecast
Remember using spreadsheets to forecast sales for your company, or maybe for a school project? Ok, so maybe not everyone had to do that, but at some point in your career you’ve likely been asked to forecast sales, inventory, or some sort of business or application metric. With Amazon Forecast, you can now feed your data into deep learning algorithms based on the same algorithms Amazon uses for their own business. Amazon says their forecasts are 50% more accurate and are completely automated. Say goodbye to continuous feeding and care of spreadsheets for forecasts. As developers, we can use Amazon Forecast in all sorts of features and components, from predicting product usage to in app features like forecasting production material needs or equipment breakdown in IoT devices.
Amazon Textract
Amazon Textract is like an OCR service except it goes a few steps further and can extract data from fields and tables, and do so very affordably. This is great news for startups or really any company needing to integrate some level of OCR into their product. Imagine quickly building a mobile app that scans old school paper copies of insurance claims, medical records or any paper form. Then taking that data and uploading to a CRM or EHR system, quickly and easily. That’s just the beginning of what’s possible with Textract and there are sure to be more complex, more exciting uses for something that is now incredibly inexpensive and accessible. How inexpensive? Try $1.50 per 1,000 pages for the Document Text API. Read more here.
Amazon Comprehend Medical
Finally, for our medical device and healthcare clients, we’re super excited to see Amazon Comprehend Medical, an expansion of Amazon Comprehend. Amazon Comprehend Medical uses Natural Language Processing to process text in documents and files. Say you have years of medical records that weren’t exactly filed away correctly. Now you can use Amazon Comprehend Medical to process those files and look for patterns. For example, maybe you have an archive of unstructured documents, like physician notes, and you want to extract documents pertaining to a particular medical condition. You can use Amazon Comprehend Medical to look for the medical terminology that coincides with that condition, making it possible to comb through archives in a matter of minutes without manual intervention. It also has the ability to detect Protected Health Information (PHI) which could be used for organizing data or in some cases, avoiding parts of data that may not be necessary for a specific use case.
These are just four of the new services that will be available via AWS in the next few months, and we’re excited to help our clients introduce new features that are now more affordable than ever. If you’d like to hear more about what AWS can offer, contact us or read all the latest announcements from re:Invent here.
