For example, in 2015, Amazon developed a smart assistant called Alexa that allows consumers to use their voice to control various functions in the home, such as music, the thermostat, and lights. When a user speaks, Alexa digitizes the command and sends it to Amazon. Amazon converts the audio file into text, and then tries to figure out from that sentence what the user meant (a so-called "intent").
This technology itself is not new, and competitors Google and Apple have also developed their own alternatives. What is interesting is that Amazon offers this entire chain of functionalities as separate services to third parties. In one smooth movement, it is within reach for everyone to create their own smart chat app.
IT as a service
This is just one example of many. The range of high-quality technical services in machine learning, language and image recognition, hosting and data processing is enormous. Does your application require a large amount of data storage? Plug AWS Redshift into your infrastructure. Is speech recognition and speech synthesis a fundamental uk whatsapp number function of your dream project? Amazon offers AWS Polly and AWS Lex, IBM has Watson, and Google has Google Speech and API.AI on offer for you.
Develop innovative products faster
All these services are already of high quality. Due to the high investments that are being made, this will only increase. The result? You buy more and more complex services externally and you pay for them based on usage. Good news for product developers, because where previous technologies from science fiction films were realistically only available to customers with deep pockets and a lot of time, it is now possible to develop innovative products faster with smaller teams.
Is this development entirely without risks? No, exchanging a dependency on your own IT department for dependencies on the services of the four big tech giants is not entirely without risks either. But one thing is certain: there is a high degree of competition. That gives buyers of their services choice and certainty in quality.
Moreover, it gives internal IT departments the space to focus on their core activities. Researching and selecting providers, securing, managing and unlocking their own data and personal data. Especially with all the new rules that are being introduced in this area in 2018, they will need their attention badly.
– Marvin de Bruin, Lead Developer.