4 AI Services You Can Use For Free Right Now On AWS
AWS has a wide array of AI services & tools you can use, many for free, to delve into AI productivity.
Did you know there is a more powerful AI chat system than ChatGPT?
AWS has recently released Amazon Q — a generative AI-powered assistant for software development.
While it targets mostly software developers and IT organizations, it can be used for most things like ChatGPT.
Along with a few other powerful AI services that you can use for free right now, here are my favorite 4 tools that I’ve used already and found really useful:
Amazon Q
Amazon Rekognition
Amazon Comprehend
Amazon Polly
I’ll go through each of them briefly and explain what they help you accomplish and how you can use them on your own projects.
Amazon Q
Amazon Q is a new type of AI assistant that focuses on two main areas of software development.
It can act as a coding assistant like Github Copilot does. It helps you write better code faster, with suggestions and optimizations and can help with refactors of your codebase.
The second area that proves even more useful is that it helps businesses interact with their data, with security and privacy in mind.
Amazon Q allows employees in an organization to chat with it to solve problems, generate content, and gain insights into organizational data.
The employees can then act upon this data by tapping into the corporate information, repositories, code, and other company data.
Let’s take a look at a quick example of using Amazon Q in your IDE for help with writing code.
On AWS you can subscribe to a monthly plan of Amazon Q (AWS is offering free unlimited access to Q until May 30th!)
Once you subscribe, you will get an access code. Use this access code when installing Q in VSCode.
You can install Amazon Q as an extension directly on VSCode:
Once you sign in, you’ll have full access to Q. You can ask it questions, optimize highlighted code, or refactor code.
You can even ask Q to generate you entire code files directly on your IDE, which is pretty nifty and a huge time saver compared to using ChatGPT.
Don’t forget to monitor your subscription to not get surprise costs or cancel after your free trial!
Amazon Rekognition
Rekognition is one of the popular AI tools in AWS’s AI arsenal.
Rekognition can recognize and identify objects in images and videos to be used for a wide range of use cases.
Many people have used Rekognition to build face recognition apps and services.
Here are some ideas of what Rekognition can do and what you can build with it.
Smart home security system: detect and recognize faces from security camera feeds and alerts homeowners of recognized or unknown individuals at their door.
Content moderation: develop a content moderation tool for social media platforms to automatically detect inappropriate or explicit content in images and videos.
Retail system: implement an e-commerce system that lets users identify retail products in images.
Here is a brief look into how Rekognition works for facial recognition:
In AWS, if you head over to the Rekognition service, you can upload an image of a celebrity, and the tool will recognize the face and provide a match confidence percentage as well.
Amazon Comprehend
Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing (NLP) service that uses machine learning to find insights and relationships in text. [1]
In simple terms, Comprehend allows you to detect tones in written text like if a text is positive, negative, has an angry tone or a happy one, etc.
A typical use case for Comprehend is to use it for content moderation in social media.
Comments and posts can be moderated when they are written to detect whether the given comment is offensive or will create a negative impact in a conversation thread.
Another use case for Comprehend is for automated custom support.
With Comprehend you can create chatbots that understand customer queries, and provide relevant responses in advanced intelligence manners.
Here’s a brief idea of how Comprehend works:
From the text in the image above, Comprehend can provide insights and relationships.
For a deeper dive intot he details of what Comprehend does, check out this link.
Amazon Polly
Last, but not least, Amazon Polly is an AI tool that can speak out any written text in a human-like voice.
Polly allows you to select different voices with different tone styles.
In Polly, you can write out long content or copy and paste content and have Polly speak it out to you.
You can choose between engine types (generative, long-form, neural or standard), languages, and male or female voices.
Of course, this can be used programmatically as well. You can use Polly’s API to speak out any written text on your website or external sources.
Here’s a quick overview of how it works:
In the text input, I write out some text “Hi my name is Uriel and I love teaching cloud computing and serverless!”.
I can choose the Engine type — I chose long-form as it has a more natural-sounding voice. I chose English as the language and a male voice to speak out the text.
The results are pretty cool if you ask me!
Try it out yourself and let me know what you think :)
Summary
AWS offers a suite of powerful AI services that can significantly enhance your software development and business operations.
We went over 4 popular AI services that AWS offers.
Amazon Q lets us chat with it to get answers and acts as a code development assistant.
Amazon Rekognition is used to recognize objects in images and videos.
Amazon Comprehend is used to help us find insights and relationships in text and moderate content.
Amazon Polly can speak out loud written text in various styles and tones.
Try these AI services out and let me know if you liked them in the comments below!
👋 My name is Uriel Bitton and I’m committed to helping you master AWS, Cloud Computing, and Serverless development. ☁️
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