Amazon unveils Q, a new generative AI chatbot to aid customer service

Noah Berger

Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing unit of Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), announced a new generative artificial intelligence chatbot on Tuesday, known as Q, in an effort to help deliver better customer experiences for organizations at a lower cost.

The technology is powered by large language models and other foundation models, available through Amazon Bedrock.

Amazon Q provides agents with recommended responses and actions based on real-time customer questions for faster and more accurate customer support, the company said in a statement.

A preview version of Q is available now, and several features are available for free, CNBC reported. Amazon (AMZN) will eventually charge business users $20 per person per month. A version with features for developers and IT workers will cost $25 per person per month.

For comparison purposes, both Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOG) (GOOGL) charge $30 per person per month for Copilot for Microsoft 365 and Duet AI for Google Workspace, respectively.

Amazon Connect Contact Lens helps identify the essential parts of call-center conversations with AI-generated summaries that detect sentiment, trends and policy compliance.

Amazon Lex in Amazon Connect today enables contact center administrators to create new chatbots and interactive voice response systems by using natural-language prompts, and improve existing systems by generating responses to commonly asked questions.

Amazon Connect Customer Profiles enables agents to deliver faster, more personalized customer service and creates unified customer profiles from disparate software-as-a-service applications and databases.

Amazon (AMZN) is expanding its generative AI capabilities as the race to tap into the technology heats up. This month, Microsoft (MSFT) unveiled Copilot for enterprises to let customer service and sales teams access data from third-party customer relationship management and contact center platforms with generative AI-supported tools.

Taking advantage of LLMs and other FMs is a difficult endeavor requiring technical expertise that is in short supply and high demand, Amazon said.

“Integrating these models into new customer experience applications that work with an organization’s existing suite of contact center tools requires further industry-specific expertise,” Amazon (AMZN) said. “Amazon Connect removes the challenges of building and deploying models in contact centers by allowing non-technical business leaders to set up a cloud contact center with generative AI capabilities within minutes.”

AWS also announced new features to make data access and analysis faster across multiple data sources, and capabilities to increase customer’s understanding of their supply chains to help improve accuracy and planning.