Amazon opens up Alexa's brain to developers

Amazon just added the artificial intelligence behind its Echo speakers to the list of services it offers to businesses. 

The company introduced a new service Wednesday called Lex, which allows developers and businesses to tap into the AI smarts that power Alexa for their own bots.

Lex is currently in a preview phase, open to developers in Northern Virginia, but Amazon plans to expand its reach in the future. 

The service allows developers to create conversational bots for Facebook Messenger (and soon Slack and Twilio) that are powered by the same speech recognition and natural language processing used for Alexa in Amazon's Echo devices. It also ties into other Amazon Web Services (AWS) tools so developers who are already using Amazon-hosted services can more easily create a bot experience.  Read more...