Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky speaks at the Bloomberg Technology Summit in San Francisco on June 22, 2023.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Amazon on Tuesday announced a new chatbot called Q for people to use at work.
The product, announced at Amazon Web Services’ Reinvent conference in Las Vegas, represents Amazon’s latest effort to challenge Microsoft and Google in productivity software. It comes one year after Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI launched its ChatGPT chatbot, which has popularized generative artificial intelligence for crafting human-like text in response to a few lines of human input.
Initially, Q can help people understand the capabilities of AWS. People will be able to talk with it in communication apps such as Salesforce’s Slack and software developers’ text-editing applications, Adam Selipsky, CEO of AWS, said onstage at Reinvent.
The tool can automatically make changes to source code so developers have less work to do, Selipsky said. The service will be able to connect to more than 40 enterprise systems, he said. That includes Microsoft 365, Dropbox, Salesforce and Zendesk. People will also be able to upload and ask questions about documents while interacting with Q.
“AWS Q will be a game changer for AWS customers who have a plethora of service options, oftentimes overlapping to navigate,” wrote Steven Dickens, vice president and practice leader at the Futurum Group, a technology research firm. “AWS has resisted the urge to make an AI assistant for each service in its portfolio and, as a result, I expect to see Q become widely adopted in the months ahead by both developers and cloud admins alike.”
A preview version of Q is available now.
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