Glimpse of the future has audience gasping

It’s not often that a technology conference keynote draws gasps of surprise from the audience. Steve Jobs pulled it off in the early iPhone and iPad unveilings, and Samsung and Google occasionally get the reaction at new product launches.

This week, in a marathon keynote address at the Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, CEO Andy Jassy delivered a tour de force of announcements that may well mark a milestone in the history of artificial intelligence.

In a two-and-a-half-hour presentation, he unveiled 22 new products and services. He clearly relished the “aahs and oohs” of the audience as he offered all businesses powerful new capabilities in AI and its hi-tech siblings — machine learning and deep learning.

AWS, Amazon’s cloud division, is on track to increase revenue this year by 50%, to $18-billion (about R246-billion), and much of that growth is based on the continual roll-out of new services. However, the scope of innovation unveiled this week was startling.

The re:Invent conference drew a record 43 000 developers, partners and media representatives, with the event spread over four convention venues. Jassy made sure they got value for their money. Five of the announcements that drew the loudest applause were:

Amazon Translate: a “neural machine translation service that delivers fast, highquality and affordable language translation”. It uses deep learning to deliver more accurate and naturalsounding translation than older, rulebased translation algorithms, at a large scale, and in real time.

Amazon SageMaker: “a fully managed service that enables data scientists and developers to quickly and easily build, train, and deploy machine learning models at any scale.” It includes some of the most common machine learning algorithms as “off-theshelf” products.

Amazon Rekognition Video: “a deep learningpowered video analysis service that tracks people, detects activities, and recognises objects, celebrities, and inappropriate content”. It recognises faces in live streams, analyses existing stored video, and automatically labels activities, people and objects, so that the content can be searched. It’s expected to transform policing and public safety at one extreme, and enhance entertainment searches at the other.

Amazon Kinesis Video Streams: previously, the Kinesis product made possible real-time analytics using data streams. The new version enables secure video streaming and other signals from connected devices for machine learning, analytics and processing. It means, for example, that data from Lidar systems, which allow selfdriving vehicles to detect people and objects, can be processed faster and more accurately.

Amazon Comprehend: a natural language-processing service that uses machine learning to analyse large amounts of text on the fly. “It identifies the language of the text, extracts key phrases, places, people, brands, or events, understands sentiment about products or services, and identifies the main topics from a library of documents.” This makes it useful for purposes as basic as organising documents, and as complex as analysing customer feedback.

Many of the new products sound like science fiction, but within the next five years will be regarded as the new normal in AI.

Signpost Amazon unit opens hi-tech treasure chest of new products

Goldstuck is the founder of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on Twitter @art2gee and on YouTube