Amazon Connect, awesome

Amazon’s AWS added Amazon Connect as a new service.  It’s a really cool solution.  The first powerful aspect of it is it solves a very common need for many businesses.  The need to have a customer callable phone system/menu that is used with VOICE. YES!!  For many companies to create a voice-based answering system is doable but very difficult.  Connecting all the dots to get the lexicon/grammar/menus and transcription is difficult.  There are some other party solutions out there but tend to overcharge businesses because they can!  Amazon in their mantra of “pay for what you use” will not overcharge in my opinion.  You will get incredible ability and services but at a low cost.  

The second powerful aspect is AWS is effectively using the same technology used in Alexa and the Lex development toolset. They've effectively built on top of that for this product.  This means as Alexa and Lex improve so will this Connect product and vice versa.  Of course, businesses can extend and customize Amazon Connect easily using AWS cloud services by integrating using Lambda functions or and other methods. That’s super awesome!

As I've said previous similar posts, AWS next step in Amazon Connect should be to allow people to use VOICE to CREATE their menuing system.  Not having to program would significantly expand who could use this service.  As phone menus/FAQ type systems are a finite domain of interaction it should be relatively easy for Amazon to do this.  They just have to get the NLP religion fully, which I’m confident they are already!!

NLP Baby!