AWS Lex Chatbots
What is Amazon Lex? Lex is a framework built by Amazon that helps you build, configure and deploy chat-based applications very quickly.
You can think of Lex as a custom REST API application running on a shared Amazon server, that has a simple yet secure set of instructions for interacting with a client application or any other AWS services. Using Amazons definition, Lex is a “Service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text”.
AWS has a very specific definition of “service” inside their own ecosystem, which is essentially any process that will consume server resources on AWS. EC2, Lambda, DynamoDB, and even S3 are all, at the end of the day, processes that run on AWS shared servers with specific APIs that allow them to be linked together.
The image above is one of my favorites, describing the most basic architecture you can use to set up Lex. There are SO MANY more advanced architectures possible on AWS, none of which I will get into here, but you should start from the basics if you are just starting with your first chatbot…
