8 AWS Services That Will Take You to the Future Faster Than a DeLorean
Barely half a century ago, people were convinced we’re going to have flying cars in 2021. We don’t — and even the self-driving ones are far from being ubiquitous. However, thanks to modern innovations, we’re already using some things no one could have even imagined a few decades ago.
We know cloud computing products and services are highly innovative — but sometimes, they can get straight-up futuristic. Let’s review some of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) offerings your parents could never believe exist already!
- Amazon Lumberyard
When we were children, we admired computer games — in fact, many of us still do. However, actually creating them from scratch seemed unthinkable.
These days, it’s not just a lot more achievable but also extremely affordable: with the Amazon Lumberyard game making engine, you only pay for the resources you use (there are no subscription fees or royalties attached) — plus, you can learn from extensive documentation, tutorials, and downloadable sample projects. Lumberyard also has a Twitch integration, which allows for real-time streaming and chatting.
2. Amazon Rekognition
Facial recognition might not be as mind-blowing as it used to be — most of us can now unlock our smartphones with a glance. However, that doesn’t mean we understand how it works and could do it ourselves if needed.
Introduced in 2016, Amazon Rekognition aimed at precisely that: now, people with no machine learning expertise can use it for simple automatic identification of faces, objects, scenes, activities, and text in images or videos — basically, all you need to do is provide the service with the images of things you need identified. It’s that easy!
3. Amazon Sumerian
Raise your hand if you ever made your grandparents try your VR headset and laughed out loud as they gasped! Virtual reality is really something past generations find hard to fathom — and yet happy us can not just enjoy it but create it.
Amazon Sumerian offers a web platform that allows you to create not just VR applications but also browser-based 3D scenes. Depending on their skill level, the user can write their own custom scripts or use ready-made templates and assets. Beginners will also appreciate a drag-and-drop user interface and the massive library of scripting APIs.
4. Amazon Translate
In the times of global reach and internationally available services, communication is more important than ever — and with Amazon Translate, it can also be more effective. We have all had our fair share of laughs using Google Translate, so it’s understandable you might feel skeptical about Amazon’s offering at first. However, once you try it, it will definitely blow your mind.
Providing neural machine translation in a whopping 71 languages from Afrikaans to Welsh (plus an ability to accurately identify languages and define custom terminology), it takes content localization to a whole new level and lets you reach users, clients, and partners in every corner of the world.
5. Amazon Honeycode
We all know well-made apps have the power to simplify our everyday’s work — but it’s not like you could snap your fingers and just have one ready, right? Well, in fact, these days, you kind of can. With a fully-managed service like Amazon Honeycode, there’s no need to worry about coding whenever you need a simple app (web or mobile) for your team.
If you’re familiar with spreadsheets and formulas (and you most probably are, if you work in a contemporary office environment), you can build simple apps following those same principles — and if your needs are pretty common (like simple surveys or inventory management), you can even use ready-made templates.
6. AWS RoboMaker
Not the most creative name for a product, right? But it’s okay — the things people can do with it are way more jaw-dropping than any fancy name could be!
While this is not necessarily a product you and I could use for fun, it’s a massive help for robotic developers, DevOps engineers, and QA specialists who need to perform application testing, simulations, and deployment. The ability to run multiple large-scale simulations at once saves a ton of money and time and hence is extremely important for the progress and efficiency of robotic innovations.
7–8. Amazon Transcribe and Amazon Polly
Recorded interviews, podcasts, or radio shows can be just as valuable of an information source as articles and books — however, it’s used a lot less due to a simple lack of convenience: audio files are not searchable. Amazon Transcribe is a service that allows you to convert speech into text in more than 30 languages, including such tongue twisters as Hebrew, Telugu, or Malay.
You can also include or remove specific words (such as terminology) or remove them (e.g., if the speech includes profanities) — plus, Transcribe adds punctuation, indicates speaker changes, and even timestamps every word for easy reference.
Apart from turning speech to text, AWS also lets you convert text to speech, eliminating the need for expensive voiceover production. Not only can Amazon Polly speak in almost 30 languages (you can also pick one of the multiple available voices for most of them), but it can also do it in two distinct reading styles — newscaster and conversational.
The possibilities this provides are endless: think voiceovers for online videos, games, podcasts, audiobooks… You name it! Best of all, this Polly does not want a cracker: you only pay for the number of characters you convert either to speech (caching and replaying generated speech is free).
All these products and services sound incredible — and the best news is, you can leverage all of them! Not familiar with AWS yet and not sure where to start? We have just the solution!
