3 Amazing AI Tools You Can Use On AWS For Free
AWS has some amazing AI services you can use for productivity and everyday tasks
AWS has some really useful AI/ML services you can use.
Most of them have free tiers and some come at a very low cost.
In a previous article, I discussed 4 AI services you can use for free, you can check that out if you’re curious.
In this article, as a follow-up, I’ll guide you through a curated list of 3 more AI services that will help you be more productive.
With each service, I’ll explain how it works, what problems it helps solve, and a small example of usage of the service.
Here is the list of AI services I’ll be discussing:
Amazon Textract
Amazon Transcribe
Amazon Translate
Let’s get started with the first service; Textract.
* one word of caution before you start using the services, always learn about the service’s pricing. Most services have a free tier, you can find out on this link or by finding the “free tier” section on the service’s home page.
Amazon Textract
Textract is a powerful service that can extract typed or handwritten text from documents or images and gathers the data intelligently, using machine learning.
Some common use cases are analyzing and understanding invoices and paystubs at a glance.
I’ve personally used it to extract text from images, it's super useful and provides the data in multiple formats as per your use case.
Below is an example of using Textract to extract and organize data from a paystub document:
Textract is able to intelligently detect all the data in the paystub and organize it in a meaningful way.
I’ve chosen the Forms option to output the results. This offers a clear and quick explanation of the document in a highly organized fashion.
I can quickly and easily see the social security number as well as the pay date and any other relevant info, at a glance.
I can also know in an instant if the document was signed by navigating to the signature section or getting the signature data programmatically from the API.
Pricing
For the first 3 months after signup to AWS, you can use Textract to detect and extract document text for 1000 pages per month for free.
Amazon Transcribe
Transcribe is another ML-powered service that will detect audible speech and write it down into text.
The way it works on the console is you start a recording stream and you speak into your microphone. Transcribe will write down the words you speak in real time, once again using ML.
Let’s see what it looks like in the console.
I clicked on the Start streaming button then spoke out the words you see in the transcription output and the service transcribed my speech into text.
I can then download a transcript of the results.
Transcribe can also be used programmatically with the API to enable the functionality in a front-end application.
Pricing
Transcribe offers 60 minutes per month for 12 months free from when you sign up on your AWS account.
Amazon Translate
Amazon Translate does as its name suggests again, translating text in real-time.
It has tons of supported languages.
Translate can also translate documents.
Here’s a look at working with it in the console.
Of course, it is more commonly used with its API to provide programmatic, real-time translations in web applications.
Let’s take a look at some examples of code on how to translate a line of text.
const AWS = require('aws-sdk');
const translate = new AWS.Translate();
const textToTranslate = "Hi, my name is Uriel and i help you learn cloyd and serverless computing!";
const params = {
SourceLanguageCode: 'en',
TargetLanguageCode: 'fr',
Text: textToTranslate
};
translate.translateText(params, (err, data) => {
if (err) {
console.log("Error", err);
} else {
console.log("Translated text:", data.TranslatedText);
}
});
The code above imports the AWS SDK which is used to interact with AWS services programmatically.
It then uses the translate API to set the source language as English and the target language as French and passes a string to translate.
We can also use “auto” as the source language to detect any language by default.
Pricing
Translate up to 2 million characters monthly for free for up to 12 months.
Summary
In this article, we went over 3 interesting AI/ML services from AWS to help us be more productive.
The services we looked at are:
Amazon Transcribe to write out spoken words
Amazon Textract to detect and extract words from documents and images
Amazon Translate to translate text and documents
Give them a try and be mindful of the free tier!
Let me know what you think of them in the comments.
👋 My name is Uriel Bitton and I’m committed to helping you master AWS, Cloud Computing, and Serverless development. ☁️
🚀 If you want to learn how to build enterprise-level, scalable, and resilient applications, follow me and subscribe.
🥰 You can also follow my journey on:
See you in the next one!