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Amazon Kendra ML-Powered Enterprise Search Service Goes GA
Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced this week the general availability of the Amazon Kendra enterprise search service. In preview since December, the machine-learning-powered service is designed to recognize and accurately reply to natural language queries, providing a more intuitive way to search.
AWS's aim with Kendra was to make search more intelligent by recognizing simply phrased queries rather than complex or "just right" combinations of keywords, the company has said. Kendra also promises to simplify search for enterprises with large volumes of unstructured data and/or data that's scattered across multiple silos.
"With just a few clicks, Amazon Kendra enables organizations to index structured and unstructured data stored in different backends, such as file systems, applications, Intranet, and relational databases," said AI/ML evangelist Julien Simon on the AWS blog. "As you would expect, all data is encrypted in flight using HTTPS, and can be encrypted at rest with AWS Key Management Service (KMS)."
Amazon Kendra can run via an API or as a console application. It can understand commonly used terms from 14 industries. "Chemical," "energy," "finance," "insurance," "IT, and "pharmaceuticals" were already supported in the preview; "automotive," "health, "HR," "legal," "media and entertainment," "news," "telecom," and "travel and leisure" are new in the GA release.
Also new in this release are connectors for three additional cloud-based data sources: Salesforce, OneDrive, and ServiceNow. That's on top of the SharePoint Online, Amazon S3, and Amazon RDS connectors that were included in the preview.
Amazon Kendra is available now out of the North Virginia, Oregon, and Ireland regions. It comes in two versions: a production-ready Enterprise Edition and a Developer Edition for test environments. The Developer Edition doesn't support being run on multiple availability zones and limits users to 4,000 queries per day on up to 10,000 searchable documents across 5 data sources.
The Enterprise Edition, however, can support up to 500,000 documents, and run up to 40,000 queries per day for $7 per hour, the company said. Users can also add capacity; an extra 40,000 queries or 500,000 searchable documents will incur $3.50 per hour.
More information on Amazon Kendra is available here.