Amazon Lex, Amazon’s console for creating chatbots, is now generally available, the company recently announced. Lex is powered by the same technology behind Alexa, the intelligent personal assistant that’s incorporated into the popular Amazon Echo device.
The Lex console guides you through the process of creating your own chatbots, which can provide customer service or productivity assistance to your organization. The process of creating chatbots with Amazon Lex is actually fairly straightforward. Here’s some more information about how to use the newly available tool:
How do you use Amazon Lex?
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Amazon Lex actually does most of the heavy lifting for you when it comes to building chatbots. It builds the natural language model, maintains context, and manages the dialogue. All you have to do, at least at first, is provide some key phrases to show the tool how your customers might try to interact with the chatbot.
Once you provide those phrases, you can test and publish your chatbot in minutes. From the Amazon Lex console, you can indicate which platform you want your chatbot created for, including Facebook Messenger, Slack, and Twilio.
How can you use Amazon Lex chatbots?
When your chatbots have already been published, your work isn’t over. Amazon Lex also gives you the ability to use prebuilt Software as a Service (SaaS) connectors to link your chatbot to apps like Salesforce, ZenDesk, QuickBooks, and HubSpot. You can also use it to create mobile apps with conversational capabilities. Then over time, you can view analytics so you can see how conversations interact with your chatbot so that you can make any necessary or beneficial changes.
The payment model for Amazon Lex allows you to pay only for the services you actually use. So you don’t have to sign an upfront contract or pay any minimum fees. And you can sign up to use the service for free now.
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