Building Chatbots with Amazon Lex by Ian Massingham

1. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Build, Deploy & Operate
Intelligent Chatbots with
Amazon Lex
Ian Massingham | AWS Technical Evangelist @IanMmmm
aws.amazon.com/startups

2. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Building Chatbots with Amazon Lex
Why did we build Amazon Lex?
What is Amazon Lex?
How do I get started using Amazon Lex?
Q&A

3. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Why Did We Build Amazon Lex?

4. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Advent of Conversational Interactions
1st Gen:
Punch Cards & Memory Registers
2nd Gen:
Pointers & Sliders
3nd Gen:
Conversational Interfaces

5. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Natural
Conversational Access to Applications
Conversational Access
On-demand
Accessible
Efficient
Natural
On-demand
Accessible
Efficient

6. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Developer Challenges
Effective conversational interfaces need to combine a large
number of sophisticated algorithms and technologies
Speech
Recognition Language
Understanding
Business Logic
Disparate
Systems
Authentication
Messaging
platforms
Scale
Testing
Security
Availability Mobile

7. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Amazon Lex:
A service for building conversational
interfaces using voice and text

8. Amazon Lex - Features
Text and speech language understanding: powered by the same
technology as Alexa
Enterprise SaaS connectors: connect to enterprise systems
Deployment to chat services
Designed for builders: efficient and intuitive tools
to build conversations; scales automatically
Versioning and alias support@

9. Text and Speech Language Understanding
Speech
Recognition
Natural Language
Understanding
Powered by the same deep learning technology as Alexa

10. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Deployment to Chat Services
Facebook
Messenger
Mobile
Card Description
Button 1
Button 2
Button 3
Card
Description
Option 1
Option 2
Authentication
Rich FormattingOne-click deployment
Amazon Lex
Twilio SMS

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Designed for Builders
Efficient and intuitive tools to build conversations

12. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Versioning and Alias Support
AliasVersioning
• Supported for Intents, Slots & Bots
• Enables multi-developer environment
• Rollback to previous versions
• Deploy different aliases to different platforms
• Run different stacks for dev, stage & prod
environments
• Target different user groups with different aliases
v1 v2 v3 latest
v1 Dev
v2 Stage
v3 Prod

13. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Amazon Lex
Utterances
Spoken or typed phrases that invoke
your intent
BookHotel
Intents
An Intent performs an action in
response to natural language user
input
Slots
Slots are input data required to fulfill
the intent
Fulfillment
Fulfillment mechanism for your intent

14. “Book a Hotel”
Book Hotel
NYC
“Book a Hotel in
NYC”
Automatic Speech
Recognition
Hotel Booking
New York City
Natural Language
Understanding
Intent/Slot
Model
UtterancesHotel Booking
City New York City
Check In Nov 30th
Check Out Dec 2nd
“Your hotel is booked for
Nov 30th”
Polly
Confirmation: “Your hotel is
booked for Nov 30th”
“Can I go ahead
with the booking?
a
in

15. Utterances
I’d like to book a hotel
I want to make my hotel reservations
I want to book a hotel in New York City
Can you help me book my hotel?

16. Slots
destination City New York City, Seattle, London, …
Slot Type Values
Check In Date Valid dates
Check Out Date Valid dates

17. Slot Elicitation
I’d like to book a hotel
What date do you check in?
New York City
Sure what city do you want to book?
Nov 30th Check In
11/30/2017
City
New York City

18. Fulfilment
AWS Lambda Integration Return to Client
User input parsed to derive
intents and slot values.
Output returned to client for
further processing.
Intents and slots passed to
AWS Lambda function for
business logic
implementation.

19. Save, Build, and Publish
Save Build
Saving your bot preserves the
current state on the server
Building your bot
creates versions that
you can test
Publish
Publishing your app will create a
version of your bot and provide an
alias to your clients
Test
Test your bot in a chat
window on the console

20. Monitoring
Track your bot
Request Latency
Missed Utterance Count
Traffic by Channel

21. Amazon Lex Pricing
Text Speech
Price per 1000 requests $0.75 $4.00
Free Tier*
(requests per month)
10,000 5,000
*Available for the first year upon sign-up to new Amazon Lex customers

22. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Demo:
You are part of the demo
Score me & leave feedback with my Amazon Lex Chatbot at
facebook.com/ian.massingham.aws

23. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.© 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
AWS LambdaAmazon Lex
Dialog & Fulfilment
Code Hook
Kinesis Stream
Kinesis Firehose
Delivery Steam
Intent Resolution
Session Management
Slot Extraction
Channels (webhooks)
Amazon Kinesis
Amazon
Elasticsearch
service
3rd Party
Sentiment API

24. Dialogue & Validation Function Structure
Intent
Router
HelpMe
RateSession
ProvideFeedback
Elicit &
Validate Slots
Elicit &
Validate Slots
Sentiment
Enrichment
Post to
Kinesis Stream
Post to
Kinesis Stream

25. Amazon Lex - Technology
Amazon Lex
Automatic Speech
Recognition (ASR)
Natural Language
Understanding (NLU)
Same technology that powers Alexa
Cognito CloudTrail CloudWatch
AWS Services
Action
AWS Lambda
Authentication
& Visibility
Speech
API
Language
API
Fulfillment
End-Users
Developers
Console
SDK
Intents,
Slots,
Prompts,
Utterances
Input:
Speech
or Text
Multi-Platform Clients:
Mobile, IoT, Web,
Chat
API
Output:
Speech (via Polly TTS)
or Text

26. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
How Do I Get Started Using
Amazon Lex?

27. Sign up for a free account @ https://aws.amazon.com/lex
Build your first bot!
✔
✔
✔

28. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Thank You. Any questions?
Score me & leave feedback with my Amazon Lex Chatbot at
facebook.com/ian.massingham.aws
Ian Massingham | AWS Technical Evangelist @IanMmmm
aws.amazon.com/startups bit.ly/devworkshops