News
New AWS Enterprise Search Service Driven By Machine Learning
Amazon Web Services recently announced a public preview of Amazon Kendra, a new natural language search service for enterprises.
Amazon Kendra can run as a console application or as an API. It lets users apply natural language queries to their companies' various content sources and receive "highly accurate" answers, according to the company.
Amazon pointed out that the service works across all kinds of information sources, allowing companies to "get rid of information silos." The public preview version comes with connectors for Microsoft SharePoint Online, Java Database Connectivity and Amazon S3. AWS said it plans to add other connectors to cloud-based services -- including Salesforce, Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox and Box -- once the product becomes generally available (although that date has yet to be released).
Other features in the public preview include support for keyword searches and natural language queries, the ability to retrieve results from unstructured data and FAQs, document ranking, relevance tuning, domain optimization and, as mentioned, a limited set of built-in connectors.
New features that will be added upon general availability are analytics, query auto-completion, incremental learning and more connectors.
AWS said it plans to offer Kendra in two flavors: a Developer Edition for testing purposes and an Enterprise Edition for production use. Pricing information is available here. Currently, the public preview is available only in the Northern Virginia, Oregon and Ireland regions.
Users can access the Kendra Preview from the AWS Management Console.
AWS' announcement of Amazon Kendra's closely follows similar news from its cloud rival Microsoft, which detailed its own efforts around AI-driven enterprise search at its November Ignite conference. Microsoft is currently running a private preview of a new "semantic search" capability for organizations.