Machine learning is the name of the game for Amazon Web Services Inc. this week, as it spills out a couple of major announcements ahead of its big re:Invent conference next week in Las Vegas.

The public cloud computing giant said Wednesday it’s planning to open a new machine learning laboratory, called the ML Solutions Lab, that will see its experts work alongside customers looking to build new artificial intelligence-based technologies. In addition, Amazon said it’s adding new features to Amazon Rekognition, a deep-learning-powered image recognition platform, including real-time face recognition and the ability to spot text in images.

The announcements underline the importance Amazon is placing on its AI efforts, which can benefit both its cloud computing arm and also its main retail business. The company has made a number of announcements in the field in recent months. For example, in October Amazon said it would collaborate with Microsoft Corp. on a deep learning interface called Gluon, which is a framework for training AI models.

Amazon’s decision to open up its ML Solutions Lab is also significant, because the move signals a greater push into business consultancy, something it needs if it’s to provide more information technology services to the biggest corporate customers.

“We can’t wait for developers to start their journeys into machine learning with the Amazon ML Solutions Lab,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Amazon AI. “By combining the expertise of the best machine learning scientists and practitioners at Amazon with the deep business knowledge of our customers, the Amazon ML Solutions Lab will help customers get up to speed on machine learning quickly, and start putting machine learning to work inside their organizations.”

Amazon said customers including the Washington Post, Janssen Pharmaceutica and the World Bank Group were already working with its ML Solutions Lab.

As for Rekognition, the new updates demonstrate how the company is rapidly applying AI to creating new products based on the technology that it can sell to its customers.

Specific updates to the platform include the detection and recognition of text in images, real-time facial recognition across millions of faces, and detection of up to 100 faces in photos that show crowds of people. The company also claims that Rekognition has been given a 10 percent accuracy boost when it comes to facial recognition.

The Rekognition platform’s customers include the popular image-based social networking platform Pinterest.

“As a visually-driven platform, Pinterest relies heavily on the speed and quality of images, but the text behind those images is just as important, as it provides context and makes Pins actionable for our 200M+ active Pinners,” said Vanja Josifovski, chief technology officer at Pinterest. “In working with Amazon Rekognition Text in Image, we can better extract the rich text captured in images at scale and with low latency for the millions of Pins stored in Amazon S3.”

Image: Amazon