AMZN Amazon.com Inc

LAS VEGAS–-Amazon.com Inc. debuted new services intended to help coders build web-based applications that tap into the retail giant's artificial-intelligence capabilities.

The company's cloud-computing unit, Amazon Web Services, unveiled the offerings at its annual conference here. Amazon Rekognition will let software developers write programs that detect the number of people in a photo, spot their gender and identify objects. It can also match faces, which could be useful in comparing two images to confirm, for example, a person's identity.

The company also launched Amazon Polly, which converts text to speech. It lets programmers transform text input, such as "The temp in WA is 75 degrees F," into spoken output that says, "The temperature in Washington is 75 degrees Fahrenheit." This feature, available in 27 languages, could be used to build conversational applications.

Another new offering, Amazon LEX, affords access to the Alexa artificial-intelligence service that runs on the company's Echo device. LEX understands spoken input, enabling developers to build software that answers questions. A pizza company, for example, could build a web-based program that asked users what toppings they wanted when they ordered a pizza. Such an application could keep track of previous orders so the system could ask customers if they wanted the same toppings again, said Andy Jassy, chief executive of Amazon Web Services.

"A lot of companies don't realize the heritage that Amazon has in the machine-learning space," Mr. Jassy said, referring to the area of artificial intelligence that makes such services practical.

The online retailer has thousands of employees focused on artificial intelligence, he added, from services that show customers who bought a particular item other items they might like to Echo's Alexa AI assistant.

"We do a lot of AI at the company," he said, something Amazon Web Services customers asked to tap into.

Write to Jay Greene at Jay.Greene@wsj.com and Laura Stevens at laura.stevens@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

November 30, 2016 15:15 ET (20:15 GMT)

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