It appears that Amazon.com Inc. is preparing to add yet another artificial intelligence service to its public cloud.

According to CNBC, the company will soon launch a commercial version of a machine translation system that is used internally to make product details and account information available in multiple languages. The source who leaked word of the offering said that Amazon is repurposing the technology to help application developers better support international users. 

The project is presumably led by the company’s Machine Translation R&D Group, which was formed after its acquisition of Pittsburgh-based Safaba Translation Systems LLC in 2015. Alon Lavie, the startup’s chief technology officer and a research professional at Carnegie Mellon University, came aboard to lead the division after the deal.

Amazon Web Services Inc. is hardly the only cloud provider that is investing in machine translation. Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp., its two biggest rivals in cloud infrastructure-as-a-service, both offer services for converting documents into different languages. That’s on top of numerous other tools that are designed to help companies process natural language content such as videos more easily.

Amazon provides a similar set of products that the translation service should complement. Among them is Lex, a speech recognition and natural language understanding engine that is also derived from an internal system, namely the Alexa voice assistant in the company’s Echo smart speakers. It’s designed mainly to power chatbots that require the ability to interact with users in a conversational manner.

CNBC’s report indicates that the translation service will be geared toward websites and apps, but it might be useful for bot makers as well given Amazon’s focus on this segment. Seeing that Microsoft’s cloud platform already provides the ability to build virtual assistants that can automatically convert messages into different languages, there’s no reason why the retail giant couldn’t do the same.

Amazon’s translation service is expected to arrive as early as a few months from now. If the company’s past product launches are any indication, the offering will most likely be introduced at its annual re:Invent conference in November.

Image: AWS