Amazon Lex and Connect Overview
Amazon Lex
Amazon Lex is the same technology that powers the Alexa devices by Amazon.
And if you don’t know Alexa, Alexa is like a little device that you have in your home and you say “Alexa, what’s the weather like tomorrow?”, and it will reply “The weather is good, it’ll be 22 degrees and it’ll be sunny.”
So, the idea is that with Amazon Lex, you get automatic speech recognition (ASR), that allows you to convert speech (spoken words) into text.
There’s also a very good thing because Lex understands the intent of text by doing natural language understanding and understands sentences.
And Amazon Lex is a technology that will help you build chatbots or call center bots. and talking about call centers, how do we build a call center?
We have Amazon Connect.
Amazon Connect
So Amazon Connect is a visual contact center that allows you to receive calls, create contact flows, and it’s all cloud-based.
It can integrate with other customer relationship system, management systems (CRMs) or AWS services.
The cool thing about Amazon Connect versus traditional offering is that there is no upfront payment.
It’s about 80% cheaper than traditional contact center solutions.
So the whole flow of building a smart contact center is that you will have, for example, a phone call to schedule an appointment that is made into a number that is defined by Amazon Connect.
So they call Amazon Connect, Lex is streaming all the information from this call and understand the intent of the phone call, and therefore, it will invoke the right Lambda function, and that Lambda function, for example, can be very smart and say, “Hey, someone has said to schedule a meeting tomorrow with Ayad at 9:00 PM”, Okay, I will go into my CRM and schedule that meeting by writing some code.
So this is the whole idea behind Lex and Connect.
So remember Lex is for ASR and Connect is for contact centers.