Amazon Web Services Inc. today announced the general availability of Amazon Kendra, a managed search platform that enterprises can use to help employees navigate internal data repositories more easily.

Kendra was first previewed at AWS’ re:Invent conference last December. Since its initial debut, AWS has improved the platform’s accuracy and added a number of more specialized features.

Kendra provides a search bar into which users can type natural-language queries to find information they need for their work. The platform uses deep learning to interpret requests, then returns a list of marching results prioritized based on relevance. Kendra looks for data in a company’s databases, file sharing repositories and other internal systems of record.

On the occasion of the platform’s general availability, AWS has expanded the number of systems it can sift through when assembling search results. Kendra now provides connectors for Salesforce, ServiceNow and Microsoft Corp.’s OneDrive cloud storage service. AWS also improved the platform’s vocabulary by adding domain-specific terms across 8 more fields: automotive, health, HR, legal, media and entertainment, news, telecommunications and travel and leisure.

“Kendra search can be quickly deployed to any application (search page, chat apps, chatbots, etc.) via the code samples available in the AWS console, or via APIs,” Julien Simon, AWS’ artificial intelligence and machine learning evangelist for the EMEA region, wrote in a blog post today.  “Customers can be up and running with state the art semantic search from Kendra in minutes.”

Companies with advanced requirements can also customize how Kendra prioritizes search results. An engineering firm using the product to organize technical documents, for instance, might want to display recent files first to ensure employees find the most up-to-date information about a project. Kendra also makes it possible to prioritize results based on other factors such as how often users view records.

The connectors and vocabulary expansions AWS announced today are joined by a new Developer Edition of the platform. It lets software teams developing an application with a search capability to create a proof-of-concept Kendra deployment for their project that can process up 4,000 queries per day. The Enterprise Edition now allows companies to raise the cap on queries and documents on a pay-as-you-go-basis if they reach the plan limit.

AWS’ competitors offer their own managed search searches. Google LLC has Cloud Search, an enterprise version of its consumer platform, while Microsoft Corp. provides Azure Cognitive Search as part of its Azure platform. 

Photo: AWS