Amazon Web Services Inc.’s artificial intelligence and machine learning credentials have gotten a boost from Canada’s most popular newspaper, The Globe and Mail.

The newspaper said today it has chosen AWS as its “standard” platform for AI and machine learning workloads after experimenting with a range of its services, including AWS SageMaker, AWS Comprehend, AWS Rekognition and AWS Textract, among others.

The Globe and Mail primarily uses these services to help curate customized content for its readers based on their interests, which are gauged by looking at the types of articles they’ve read most in the past. The SageMaker service, for example, helps the paper to understand how its readers engage with and respond to different types of content, and then predict how well new stories are likely to be received by each particular reader before they are published.

These insights help the newspaper’s editorial team to decide which kinds of stories should go behind a paywall, which should be free for everyone to read, and which should be promoted, as well as for how long.

The Globe said it’s also using Amazon Polly, which is a text-to-speech service that transforms its articles into audio for those who prefer to listen to their daily news. “The Globe and Mail is investing heavily in data science and artificial intelligence,” Greg Doufas, the paper’s chief technology and digital officer, said in a statement.

In addition to using Amazon’s AI and machine learning services, The Globe said, it has chosen the company as its “preferred cloud provider.” It didn’t elaborate on what that means, but it generally means a company uses Amazon’s more traditional cloud technologies, such as its compute and storage services.

Photo: The Globe and Mail