Amazon unveils artificial intelligence products for ‘cloud’

Bloomberg

Amazon.com Inc. introduced an image recognition program, a speech-to-text service dubbed Polly, and tools for building conversational apps, highlighting its push to add artificial intelligence to its cloud-computer offerings.
Andy Jassy, chief executive officer of the Amazon Web Services unit, unveiled the new products at the company’s fifth annual re:Invent conference, which drew 32,000 people from diverse industries to Las Vegas. He pitched Amazon’s wide breadth of services and ability to customize them for clients, while poking fun at competitor Oracle Corp., which Amazon dismisses as a cloud pretender.
The event attracted people from financial services, health care, gaming and other industries interested in learning more about how to use cloud computing, and let Amazon flex its muscles as a market leader in the fast-growing industry. Public cloud spending is expected to increase almost 17 percent to $204 billion this year, according to researcher Gartner Inc.
Amazon is trying to maintain its lead over Microsoft Corp., Alphabet Inc.’s Google, IBM and Oracle as more companies transition from using their servers to renting computing power and data space hosted remotely, which they access via the internet. Movie-service Netflix Inc. is a prominent example of a web company powered by Amazon Web Services. Capital One Financial Corp. announced Tuesday it would transition more of its data to Amazon, highlighting growing interest of the financial sector in the speed and flexibility of cloud computing.
The feud between Amazon and Oracle heated up in September when Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison, introduced new cloud products during his company’s OpenWorld keynote address and said, “Amazon’s lead is over.”
A slide in Jassy’s presentation highlighted the “ability to see through the hand-waving and bombast,” and featured a photo of Ellison popping up intermittently. Another slide proclaimed Amazon freed users from “customer hostile database vendors,” showing part of the red Oracle logo as the letter o in hostile.
The competition will increase with Amazon’s announcement Wednesday that its database tool Aurora will be compatible with additional open-source databases, said Al Hilwa, who directs software development research at IDC.
In the third quarter, Amazon had about 45 percent of the market for infrastructure as a service, where companies buy basic computing and storage power from the cloud, according to Synergy Research Group. Amazon’s revenue is more than twice that of the next three players combined, Synergy said.
Amazon’s Web Services division is the Seattle-based company’s fastest-growing and most profitable source of revenue, offsetting regular quarterly losses from its e-commerce operation. Cloud computing revenue is projected to top $10 billion this year.