Amazon debuts Polly and Lex services

Amazon.com Inc. introduced an image recognition service and a speech-to-text service dubbed Polly and Lex, respectively, which will let customers build conversational apps similar to its Alexa voice-activated platform.

Andy Jassy, chief executive officer of the Amazon Web Services unit, introduced the new cloud-computing products at the company’s fifth annual re:Invent conference, which drew 32,000 people from diverse industries to Las Vegas.

The event drew people from financial services, health care, gaming and other industries and let Amazon flex its muscles as a market leader in the fast-growing industry. Public cloud spending is expected to increase almost 17 percent to $204 billion this year, according to researcher Gartner Inc.

Amazon is trying to maintain its lead over Microsoft Corp., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and IBM as more companies transition from using their servers to renting computing power and data space hosted remotely, which they access via the internet.

Amazon’s new artificial intelligence services will let customers create applications hosted on Amazon Web Services that understand what’s displayed in photos and what users are saying. Microsoft offers the ability to bake similar artificial intelligence into applications run on its Azure cloud services, and Google earlier this year launched business tools and products based on its own artificial intelligence technology to entice more companies to rent its cloud-computing services.

— Bloomberg News