Amazon’s cloud technology platform Amazon Web Services (AWS) is currently hosting its annual event called re:Invent 2023, which began yesterday November 28, and will continue through December 1. The keynote session on the first two days was packed with announcements and updates. Among them, one announcement has particularly captured people’s attention – AWS CEO Adam Selipsky launched a generative AI-powered assistant called Amazon Q. Let us know what it is.
What is Amazon Q
Amazon Q is an AI chatbot, similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google Bard. But in functionality, it is very different from either of them. Amazon Q is a business-focused chat tool that allows users to ask questions specific to their companies.
What that means is instead of just being a universal chatbot fed on huge amounts of generalistic data, Amazon Q also feeds on the data of a business and answers questions about the business itself. For example, employees can ask about guidelines around a specific operation and gain clarity.
This is not to say that the chatbot cannot draft emails, or summarize large texts either. It can do all of that but also raise a ticket or reveal codes from an older project. Its specialty lies in the fact that it can handle technical questions with ease.
The official website of the chatbot highlights an example to explain its prowesses. It explains, “Ask Amazon Q: “What is the financial impact of delayed replenishment orders?” in the AWS Supply Chain application, and it will reply, “The delays will cause 20 of your fast-moving products to go out of stock, with a revenue impact of $150K. You could expedite shipments to reduce the revenue impact by $95K, at a cost of $2.4K.”
Another way the chatbot can help is as follows. “Ask Amazon Q: “What are the ways to build a web application on AWS?” in the AWS Management Console. Amazon Q will provide a list of potential services like Amplify, Lambda, and Amazon EC2 with the advantages of each and links to getting started resources”, as per the website.
Users can access Amazon Q through the AWS Management Console or individual companies’ documentation pages, developer environments like Slack, and other third-party apps. Selipsky has also said that questions asked on Amazon Q will not be used to train any foundational models.
