AWS launches machine learning-powered enterprise data search service

Cloud company Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched a machine learning (ML)-powered internal data search service for enterprises. 

Dubbed Amazon Kendra, the solution will help customers index their internal data sources, make that data searchable and allow users to get answers to natural language queries, the company said in a statement.

The service searches across all data silos of an organisation to provide accurate results instead of a random list of links in response to keyword searches, making the service more utilitarian, the Seattle based company said. The search engine’s natural language understanding is a key differentiator, the cloud business division of ecommerce giant Amazon added. 

Amazon Kendra does not require any ML expertise and can be set up within the AWS management console, the company said. Businesses can use Amazon Kendra to search internal documents spread across portals and wikis, while research organisations can create a searchable archive of experiments and notes, it added.

“Search within organisations is difficult to implement, slows down productivity and frequently doesn’t work because their data is scattered across many silos in many formats. Using keywords is also counterintuitive, and the results returned often require scanning through many irrelevant links and documents to find useful information, which Amazon Kendra solves,” Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of machine learning at AWS, said.

Amazon Kendra encrypts data in transit and at rest, and integrates it with commonly-used data repository types such as file systems, applications, intranet and relational databases to help developers index their company’s content without writing any code, the statement said.

The platform also provides a native cloud and on-premises connectors to popular data sources such as SharePoint, OneDrive, Salesforce, ServiceNow and Amazon Simple Storage Service. 

Last week, AWS had made the UltraWarm storage tier for its Elasticsearch service generally available. This helps users collect, analyse and visualise machine-generated log data from websites, mobile devices and sensors. 

Late last month, AWS had made its fully managed service called Augmented Artificial Intelligence (A2I), generally available. The service helps add a human review to machine learning predictions to improve model and application accuracy.