Working with Amazon Lex - Chatbots

In this Amazon Lex lesson, you will be guided through an in-depth study of the Amazon Lex service. We review where and when to use this service to best effect. We'll go over Chatbots in general and why they have become both useful and popular. You will be introduced to the key features and core components within the Amazon Lex service. We spend time understanding and reviewing Amazon Lex Bots, Intents, Utterances, Slots, and Slot Types. 

We focus on the developer workflow and how Amazon Lex integrates seamlessly with other AWS services. We take a look at and review the capabilities of the Amazon Lex API and associated SDKs. We review Versioning and Aliases and how they facilitate development within the Amazon Lex service. Finally, we walk you through building a fully functional chatbot implemented using the Amazon Lex service, which when completed will allow you to start and stop EC2 instances.

Learning Objectives 

• Understand the basic principles of Amazon Lex for building Conversational Interfaces
• Learn how to effectively use Amazon Lex to manage and maintain your own chatbots
• Recognize and explain how to perform all basic Amazon Lex related tasks such as configuring Intents, Slots, and Lambda functions (code hooks)
• Understand IAM security permissions required for Amazon Lex to interact with other AWS services such as EC2
• Be able to competently manage Amazon Lex using the AWS console

Intended Audience

• AWS Administrators
• Software Developers and Engineers

Prerequisites

To be able to get the most out of this lesson we recommend having a basic understanding of:

• Chatbots
• AWS Lambda
• Software Development
• Basic understanding of Python

Coding Resources

The example code used within this lesson can be found here:

https://github.com/cloudacademy/lexstartstopinstances

Related Training Content

After completing this lesson we recommend taking the 'Introduction to Amazon Rekognition' lesson.

To discover more content like this, you will find all of our training in the Cloud Academy Content Training Library.