Amazon Web Services (AWS): Lex: Points to remember

Let's learn about Amazon Lex:

  1. Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces using voice and text.

  2. The most common use-cases of Lex include: Informational bot, Application/Transactional bot, Enterprise Productivity bot and Device Control bot.

  3. Lex leverages Lambda for Intent fulfillment, Cognito for user authentication & Polly for text to speech.

  4. Lex scales to customers needs and does not impose bandwidth constraints.

  5. Lex is a completely managed service so users don’t have to manage scaling of resources or maintenance of code.

  6. Lex uses deep learning to improve over time.

  7. Lex bot can be created both via Console and REST APIs.

  8. Lex provides the option of returning parsed intent and slots back to the client for business logic implementation.

  9. Users can track metrics for their bot on the ‘Monitoring’ dashboard in the Lex Console.

  10. Lex provides SDKs for iOS and Android.

  11. Users can use AWS Mobile Hub to build, test & monitor bots for their mobile platforms.

  12. Lex bots can be published to messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger, Slack, Kik & Twilio SMS.

  13. Every version of an Amazon Lex bot will have an ARN.

  14. Lex supports up to 15 seconds of speech input.

  15. Lex supports the following formats for input audio: LPCM and Opus; Supported output audio formats: MPEG, OGG, PCM.

  16. Lex can be accessed from VPC via public endpoints for building and running a bot.

  17. Lex does not support wake word functionality.

  18. Lex provides the ability for users to export their Lex bot schema into a JSON file that is compatible with Amazon Alexa.

  19. Any content processed by Lex is encrypted and stored at rest in the AWS region where users are using Lex.

  20. Users can build bots using SDKs: Java, JavaScript, Python, CLI, .NET, Ruby on Rails, PHP, Go & CPP.

  21. Lex is supported under Developer Support, Business Support and Enterprise Support plans.

  22. Every input to Lex bot is counted as a request.

  23. To build an Lex bot, user will need to identify a set of actions - known as 'intents’.

  24. To fulfill an intent, the Lex bot needs information from the user. This information is captured in ‘slots’.

  25. Lex is capable of eliciting multiple slot values via a multi-turn conversation.

A Points to remember series by Piyush Jalan.

Stay tuned for AWS re:Invent 2019 updates !!