AWS announces enterprise search service Amazon Kendra

E-commerce giant Amazon's Cloud arm Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Tuesday announced the general availability of Amazon Kendra, an enterprise search service powered by machine learning.

Amazon Kendra uses machine learning to enable organisations to index all of their internal data sources, make that data searchable, and allow users to get precise answers to natural language queries.

Amazon Kendra is currently available in US East (N Virginia), US West (Oregon), and EU West (Ireland), with other regions coming soon.

"We're excited to make Amazon Kendra available to our customers and enable them to empower their employees with highly accurate, machine learning-powered enterprise search, which makes it easier for them to find the answers they seek across the full wealth of an organization's data," explained Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President, Amazon Machine Learning, AWS.

Companies like 3M, PwC and Allen Institute are among the customers and partners who are already using Amazon Kendra.

According to AWS, businesses can use Amazon Kendra to search internal documents spread across portals and wikis, research organisations can create a searchable archive of experiments and notes, and contact centers can use Amazon Kendra to find the right answer to customer questions across the complete library of support documentation.

Amazon Kendra requires no machine learning expertise and can be set up completely within the AWS Management Console.

"Using keywords is counterintuitive, and the results returned often require scanning through many irrelevant links and documents to find useful information," said Sivasubramanian.

Amazon Kendra provides a wide range of native cloud and on-premises connectors to popular data sources such as SharePoint, OneDrive, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Amazon Simple Storage Service, and relational databases, with more being added throughout this year.

Developers can quickly and easily add data sources to their Amazon Kendra search index by selecting the connector type, and those connectors will maintain document access rights.