AWS offers a group of AI Services (for example, Amazon Rekognition for image and video analysis, Amazon Polly for text-to-speech, Amazon Transcribe for speech-to-text, and Amazon Translate for language translation). These services are ready-made — you don’t need to train or deploy machine learning models yourself. You just call the API and get the results.
Amazon SageMaker is a machine learning platform that lets you build, train, and deploy machine learning models at scale. Key features include pre-built algorithms, managed Jupyter notebooks, built-in model tuning, automatic scaling, model hosting endpoints, and integration with data sources like S3. It’s meant for teams that need to create custom models, not just use pre-trained ones.
Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing (NLP) service. It analyzes text to find insights such as sentiment (positive, negative, neutral), key phrases, entities (people, places, brands), and topics. You would use it for things like customer feedback analysis, content classification, or extracting information from documents.
Amazon Lex is used to create chatbots. It provides natural language understanding (NLU) and automatic speech recognition (ASR), so users can interact with applications using voice or text. You design intents (what users want), slots (parameters), and responses. Lex handles the conversation flow and can integrate with AWS Lambda or other back-end services.
AI Services (like Rekognition, Comprehend, Polly) are ready-made and provide specific AI capabilities through simple APIs — no machine learning skills needed. ML Services (like SageMaker) give you the tools to build, train, and deploy your own machine learning models. In short, AI Services = pre-trained, task-focused; ML Services = build-your-own, customizable.
Amazon Translate is a neural machine translation service. It can quickly translate text between many languages. You send text in one language via the API and receive the translated text in another. It’s used in multilingual websites, apps, and chat systems to provide real-time or batch translations.
Amazon Polly converts written text into natural-sounding speech. It supports many languages and voices. Common use cases include voice assistants, automated phone systems, content narration, or reading text for visually impaired users.
AWS provides AI Services as pre-trained models for common tasks — e.g., Rekognition (image/video), Comprehend (text/NLP), Polly (text-to-speech), Translate (language), Transcribe (speech-to-text), Textract (document analysis). These services let you add AI features without creating or training your own models.