Amazon Lex
- What it is
- Build conversational interfaces — chatbots and voice bots — using the same technology as Alexa.
- Combines automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language understanding (NLU).
- Core concepts
- Intent — what the user wants (“BookHotel”). Utterances — example phrasings that map to it. Slots — the parameters to collect (city, dates). Fulfillment — a AWS Lambda function that does the work.
- Integrations
- Amazon Connect for contact center self-service, Amazon Polly for spoken responses, Slack/Teams/Facebook Messenger channels.
- Not to be confused with
- Amazon Q and Amazon Bedrock — generative AI over foundation models, free-form. Lex is intent-driven and deterministic, which is what you want for transactional flows like booking or account lookups.
- Exam signal
- “Build a chatbot / voice bot” → Lex.