Half of all businesses spend more on chatbots than on mobile apps, but Amazon Lex could cut your dev and operational costs while delivering a smarter automated live chat experience.
Key Takeaways: 5 Reasons to Use Amazon Lex for Your Chatbot
- Amazon Lex fuels chatbots with sophisticated natural language understanding and automated speech recognition.
- Amazon Lex is easy to use, includes one-click deployment, integrates with the AWS ecosystem, and is cost-effective.
- You can find Amazon Lex-powered chatbots in call centers, in apps, on Facebook, and within enterprises.
- Amazon Lex is designed to be easy to implement with a basic dev background.
- Cloud managed services for AWS can take over Amazon Lex implementation and maintenance.
The world is well into the rise of chatbots. In 2020, chatbots are so ubiquitous that customers are coming to expect them over live chat with a human being:
- 95% of consumers say that customer service will be the industry that benefits most from chatbots
- 67% of consumers used a chatbot for customer support over the last year
- 56% of users would rather message a chatbot than talk to customer service on the phone
- 53% of users would rather shop with a business that offers text chat
- 40% of Millennials say they interact with chatbots
That alone builds a compelling case for investing in chatbots, and it’s only considering the customer’s side of the story! Chatbots can also save the business deploying them up to 30% in customer support costs by reducing staffing requirements and decreasing downtime.
Building a better chatbot is necessary, but it can be resource-intensive and hard to get right without the correct framework and tools.
That might not sound difficult, but there’s only one cost-effective service on the market that can:
- Build conversational voice or text interfaces into your app
- Convert speech to text with automated speech recognition
- Use advanced deep learning functionality to guide each conversation
- Recognize intent by natural language understanding
Meet Amazon Lex
Amazon Lex is a cloud-based service for automatic speech recognition and natural language understanding. It’s part of the Amazon Web Services ecosystem of cloud computing services.
You’ve probably interacted with Lex without knowing in some capacity, as most consumers have. Not only does Lex power thousands of chatbots across every channel, but it’s the brains behind Alexa, the intelligent personal assistant that voices Amazon Echo and Alexa devices.
The use cases for Amazon Lex are diverse. In fact, you can leverage Lex during the design phase of any chatbot type, from customer support bots to transactional bots and beyond.
Lex is unique among automatic speech recognition services because it can:
- Act as a platform for building cross-channel text and voice conversational interfaces
- Apply deep learning to automatic speech recognition to recognize textual intent
- Build multi-turn conversations by finding intent and prompting users for the next action
- Fuel customer conversations that are more lifelike and engaging
- Scale through your business’ growth automatically as a fully managed service
- Converse with customers and internal users through AWS services, Facebook Messenger, Twilio SMS, or Slack
Why your business needs Amazon Lex
Businesses that put Amazon Lex to work find that their devs get the implementation done faster and spend fewer resources doing so. When your dev team is already busy and your resources overallocated, using Lex gives your business and dev team a leg up with benefits like:
- User-friendly console: Amazon Lex can generate a complete natural language model using some quick parameter specifications and example phrases. Because it takes minutes to build a conversational interface on this console, it’s simple for devs to test out different models, which means you can find the most effective way to build a chatbot (and not just the easiest way).
- One-click deployment: The fact that Amazon Lex operates as a fully managed service means that deployment is effortless and automatic. That makes it feasible to build and test chatbots across channels and platforms without stretching your resources, overprovisioning hardware, or overloading your infrastructure.
- AWS integration: Amazon Lex integrates with critical services in the AWS ecosystem, including Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Lambda, Amazon Cognito, Amazon DynamoDB, and more. These seamless integrations save your team time applying security and monitoring to live convos. You can also connect with the most popular SaaS apps, including Salesforce, Zendesk, and Marketo.
- Cost-effective scaling: Lex’s pay-as-you-go pricing model lacks minimums or upfront costs. Instead, users pay only for the speech and text requests that they use at a competitive price per request. The Amazon Lex free tier lets you get started without any investment or commitment. While this model is a draw for any business, it’s especially helpful for businesses with seasonal call volume changes or rapid scaling.
Use cases for Amazon Lex
If you can imagine a use for a chatbot, there’s a way to implement it with Amazon Lex. The service’s appeal lies in its versatility: There isn’t a certain type of bot that it specializes in creating; instead, Lex is a solid framework for the entire spectrum of chatbot uses.
That being said, the most popular use cases for Amazon Lex include:
- Call center chatbots: These bots apply automatic speech recognition and natural language understanding to follow intent and context while fluidly managing the conversation. They can replace agents for tasks like changing passwords, checking balances, and booking appointments.
- App chatbots: Devs can use Lex to build chatbots that live within a native app for iOS, Android, or PC. The Lex voice or chat interface can integrate with Amazon Cognito to enable user management and authentication, as well as sync chat histories within the app across devices.
- Informational chatbots: Chatbots that operate within Lex can handle informational requests and return answers on current events, weather updates, or sports scores. Cross-platform support means that users can rely on your informational chatbot from their phone, tablet, or PC.
- Enterprise chatbots: Amazon Lex isn’t only for creating consumer-facing chatbots — it can streamline organizational bottlenecks, too. Instead of sending employees to check Salesforce for sales data, Zendesk for customer status, and HubSpot for email campaign status, a chatbot can aggregate it all in one place.
What businesses use Amazon Lex?
Thousands of businesses in hundreds of industries use Amazon Lex to fuel their chatbots. Those businesses represent industries including (but by no means limited to) professional services, consumer retail, e-commerce, payment processing and financial services, and many more.
Some notable brands that Amazon Lex highlights as current customers include:
- GE Appliances uses Amazon Lex (alongside Amazon Polly and Amazon Connect) to automate tasking during customer calls and reduce call wait times.
- Dynatrace develops complex user interactions within the Amazon Lex UI to move the agent focus from data extraction and classification to business logic.
- Square uses Lex to shorten the time it takes to get customers to a resolution, improving engagement, and providing a better sales and customer service experience.
CloudHesive can manage your Amazon Lex implementation and beyond
Amazon Lex is the most user-friendly platform for implementing and maintaining an intelligent chatbot. Still, no matter how simple the process is, it takes time that you may not want to allocate to building a chatbot.
Instead, consider enlisting an Amazon Premier Partner or Amazon Managed Services Partner to take the implementation and subsequent management off your team’s task list.
Work with CloudHesive and not only will we help you make the most of your Amazon Lex investment, but our managed services can extend to cloud security, reliability, availability, and scalability. Contact us today to learn how we can reduce your operating costs, improve productivity, and run a better cloud chatbot!
