Amazon Web Services Inc.’s big re:Invent conference officially kicked off today in Las Vegas and the cloud giant has wasted no time today, announcing an array of services and features headlined by new artificial intelligence offerings.

Amazon Transcribe Medical

First up is Amazon Transcribe Medical, an AI transcription service that enables medical professionals to dictate notes and record patient conversations. It’s AWS’ attempt to free up some of the several hours per day that the average primary care physical spends on administrative tasks such as data entry.

Amazon Transcribe Medical is provided as an application programming interface that can be plugged into healthcare services. It’s HIPAA-eligible, automatically adds pronunciation marks into transcribed text where appropriate and, according to AWS, supports virtually any device that has a microphone. That means developers could theoretically bring it to smart speakers such as Amazon’s Echo devices, which are already finding use in some medical settings.

SageMaker comes to Kubernetes

SageMaker is an AWS service that allows developers to build and train AI models without managing the infrastructure below. Now, software teams can carry out SageMaker projects via Kubernetes thanks to a set of new operators that the cloud giant is rolling out.

“Each Amazon SageMaker Operator for Kubernetes provides you with a native Kubernetes experience for creating and interacting with your [SageMaker] jobs, either with the Kubernetes API or with Kubernetes command-line utilities such as kubectl,” AWS senior product manager Aditya Bindal explained in a blog post.

SiteWise Monitor 

SiteWise, AWS’ service for analyzing data from industrial equipment, is getting a new visualization tool that displays operational information in graphs. It’s available as a browser-based application under the name SiteWise Monitor. A plant’s maintenance team can use it to build dashboards that shows how often each piece of equipment is down due to technical issues, while a business analyst at the same facility could visualize factory output.

SiteWise Monitor has arrived as part of a broader update to the service that brings other analytics features, too. Chief among them is a new digital twins capability. Companies can now take sensor measurements from physical assets such as a production line and create a digital copy, or twin, of the hardware that lets analysts virtually experiment with new ways to optimize operations. 

EC2 Image Builder 

Copies of Windows Server and Linux running on AWS instances need to be  updated when there’s a new version available just like the operating system of a physical server. Administrators typically either perform the task manually or create custom scripts to automate the process, but AWS claims that EC2 Image Builder offers a better way.

The newly revealed service provides a graphical interface for  handling operating system updates. Administrators can use EC2 Image Builder to customize Windows Server and Linux distribution updates as needed, test the new version to see if works and then automatically deploy the update to their companies’ cloud environments. 

AI-generated music (and simplified licensing)

Topping off the list of new offerings unveiled during AWS’ midnight announcement bonanza is DeepCompose, a AI-powered musical keyboard. The device allows developers to familiarize themselves with machine learning by building and training models that generate music. AWS now offers no fewer than three different AI learning devices: DeepComposer joins the recently upgraded DeepRacer remote-controlled model car and the DeepLens camera.

Lastly, AWS also rolled out several smaller enhancements, including new features for managing software licenses companies use on its cloud platform.  

Photo: AWS