Amazon on Tuesday announced a new chatbot called Q that people will be able to use at work.
The product, announced at the Amazon Web Services Reinvent conference in Las Vegas, represents Amazon’s latest attempt to challenge Microsoft and Google in productivity software. This comes a year after Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI launched its ChatGPT chatbot, which popularized generative artificial intelligence to generate human-like text in response to a few lines of human input.
Q is named after the character of the same name in the James Bond films or the character Q in the Star Trek television shows, depending on which AWS executive you ask.
A pre-release version of Q is already available, and some of its features are available for free. After the preview period ends, the business tier will cost $20 per person per month. A version with additional features for developers and IT workers will cost $25 per person per month. Copilot for Microsoft 365 and Duet AI for Google Workspace for business workers are $30 per person per month.
Initially, Q can help people understand the capabilities of AWS and solve problems. “People will be able to talk to it in communication apps like Salesforce’s Slack and in software developers’ text-editing apps,” said Adam Selipski, CEO of AWS, on stage at Reinvent. It will also appear in the AWS Online Management Console. Q may provide document citations to back up his chat answers.
The tool can automatically make changes to source code so that developers have less work to do, Selipski said. According to him, the service will be able to connect to more than 40 corporate systems. As a result, people can use Q to discuss information stored in Microsoft 365, Dropbox, Salesforce, and Zendesk, as well as AWS’s S3 storage service. People will also be able to upload documents and ask questions about them while interacting with Q.
“AWS Q will be a game-changer for AWS customers who have multiple, often overlapping service options to navigate,” wrote Stephen Dickens, vice president and practice leader at Futurum Group, a technology industry research firm. ” AWS has defied the appetite to make an AI adjunct for every service in its portfolio, and as a result, I anticipate Q to come extensively espoused by inventors and cloud administrators alike in the coming months.”
Over the years, Amazon has introduced several end-user applications. There are tools for supply chain management, email, encrypted messaging, video calling, customer service and marketing. Neither has been very successful, and AWS makes most of its revenue from core computing and storage services.
Administrators will be able to determine whether Q can answer people’s questions about general topics, said Deepak Singh, AWS vice president.
