What's the Difference Between Amazon Lex vs Amazon Polly?

If you are wanting to create a chatbot with AWS services, in this post you’ll learn the difference between Amazon Lex compared to Amazon Polly.

Improving a user experience is not the only benefit of having a conversational user interface. The ability to create a natural language interface adds a layer of sophisticated intelligence that can also help reduce cost through streamlining business processes and automating work streams.

Amazon Web Services has two services in this space that can help support improving the customer experience. In this post, we’re going to compare two popular services offered by AWS to help build scalable machine learning powered applications: Amazon Lex and Amazon Polly. While they are both services offered by the same company, they are very different in terms of the service they both provide.

Similarities Between Amazon Lex vs Amazon Polly

Amazon Lex and Amazon Polly provide the foundational building structures to create voice-based services without requiring integration. Users of these services can choose whether or not to integrate into the popular Alexa Voice Services platform as well as integrate into their own applications.

The Main Difference Between Amazon Lex vs Amazon Polly

Amazon Lex is a powerful conversation framework that allows developers to integrate conversational experiences by embedding voice and text interfaces into new and existing applications. It is the behind-the-scenes service that powers Alexa. Amazon Lex is a service for building these conversational user interfaces.

Amazon Polly is a service that converts text into natural speech, allowing developers to create applications that talk back to users with a custom voice and build speech-enabled applications and products using Text-to-Speech (TTS) service. Amazon Polly is offered with over a dozen languages in both male and female voices to help target global audiences.

Amazon Lex Overview

Amazon Lex is an AWS cloud service released in 2018 that allows you to build conversational interfaces using voice and text in any application.

Amazon Lex Use Cases

Use cases for Amazon Lex includes building customer and employee chatbots, virtual agents, conversational integrated voice recognition systems (IVRs), and application skill bots.

Amazon Polly Overview

Amazon Polly is an AWS cloud service released in 2016 that converts text into lifelike speech, allowing applications and products to enable speech that supports 60 voices across over a dozen languages.

Amazon Polly Use Cases

Use cases for Amazon Polly include voice recordings for content, e-learning courses, and telephony contact center prompts.

Benefits of Amazon Lex vs Amazon Polly Together

Both of these services can work together by having Amazon Lex handle the interface, while Amazon Polly can be utilized to provide life-like voices back to the user. When utilizing both Amazon Lex and Amazon Polly together, organizations can access a larger global customer audience through the large variety of languages supported by the services. In addition, with both of these services being cloud based, businesses can take advantage of the agility cloud services provide in order to increase speed-to-market for a larger, and more diverse customer base.

Other Amazon Services That Work Well with Polly and Lex for Creating a Chatbot

Amazon Connect is a self-service contact center that is an omini-channel cloud contact center that allows businesses to add agents that are located anywhere, allowing them to offer chat and voice conversations.

Amazon Rekognition provides the ability to add image and video processing service that can identify content in images. When used with Polly and Lex, Amazon Rekognition can create a sophisticated bot that can interact with users at an elevated level in order to increase the engagement of the user.

Frequently Asked Questions About Amazon Lex vs Amazon Polly

Can I use Amazon Chatbot instead of Amazon Lex and Amazon Polly?

Amazon Chatbot is actually an interactive agent that informs your team via channels like Slack and Chime (and others) to inform you of any issues with y our Amazon Web Services resources. Amazon Chatbot hooks into the Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) that then allows organizations to integrate it to other services to better enable monitoring of AWS deployments. While it can push notifications, you can’t push notifications back to AWS currently.

Summary About Amazon Lex vs Amazon Polly

Both of these incredible services allow organizations to quickly and easily scale their applications to reach a larger global audience. With both of these services being hosted in the cloud, organizations no longer have to experiment and develop their own services. These platforms allow organizations to quickly turn on these resources and services, and dramatically increase the time-to-market for their innovative products and applications. As Amazon Lex and Amazon Polly continue to mature, additional languages will continually be added in order to increase the needs of global customers when creating self-service bots and voice enabled applications.

What’s the Difference Between Amazon Lex vs Amazon Polly?