The AWS machine learning services are more examples of the newer offerings.  Nevertheless, these are growing fast and can help you embrace cutting edge technology.  Machine learning is a recent technology in general so the time you spend understanding these services may help you land that next job.
This service provides a method for building, training, and deploying machine learning models at any scale.  This is a great way to try out machine learning.  The time you spend here is good to use on your next resume update.  You do need to put some data on S3 to analyze and then check out the use cases.  There is a free tier for the first two months.

Amazon Comprehend

Quick and easy text analysis.  Send your text to this service to analyze it for keywords among many other ways to do so.  There is a free tier you can use to try it out and find out ways to organize and mine your content.

Amazon Lex

This service allows you to build voice and chatbots using the technology that drives Alexa.  There are some templates, and the interface makes it easy to get started quickly.

Amazon Polly

If you want to create audio from your content, then this is the service for you.  Try out the service a few thousand words at a time for free, and you can even download the audio in mp3 format.

Amazon Rekognition

The features that Comprehend provides for text is moved into the video world by Rekognition.  This service analyzes video and can highlight or recognize people, objects, and other details you might search for in a stream.

Amazon Translate

This service provides a quick and easy way to translate text between any two languages.  Much like Google translate, it is quick and provides an API that you can use to significantly increase your audience.

Amazon Transcribe

If you have ever wondered about transcribing audio notes (or a podcast), then this is the service for you.  It is quick and easy to customize for even highly technical terms.  The accuracy varies based on the clarity of the audio and background noise.
This service is best understood by utilizing the tutorials.  It provides a way to analyze videos for objects, faces, and activities.  An essential difference between this and the others is that this is a piece of hardware and not just a service.  It provides a camera with HD and onboard analysis tools for real-time processing of video.
This service provides quick start machine learning on EC2 through the AMIs.  The configuration of a machine learning development environment can be tedious and time-consuming.  These AMI options offer a shortcut to get working sooner.

Apache MXNet on AWS

This is a machine learning framework

Apache MXNet is a fast and scalable training and inference framework with an easy-to-use, concise API for machine learning.

MXNet includes the Gluon interface that allows developers of all skill levels to get started with deep learning on the cloud, on edge devices, and mobile apps. In just a few lines of Gluon code, you can build linear regression, convolutional networks and recurrent LSTMs for object detection, speech recognition, recommendation, and personalization.

TensorFlow on AWS

This is a machine learning framework on AWS.  I think their description works best and avoids any ignorance about it on my end.

“TensorFlow™ enables developers to quickly and easily get started with deep learning in the cloud. The framework has broad support in the industry and has become a popular choice for deep learning research and application development, particularly in areas such as computer vision, natural language understanding, and speech translation.  You can get started on AWS with a fully-managed TensorFlow experience with Amazon SageMaker, a platform to build, train, and deploy machine learning models at scale. Or, you can use the AWS Deep Learning AMIs to build custom environments and workflows with TensorFlow and other popular frameworks including Apache MXNet, PyTorch, Caffe, Caffe2, Chainer, Gluon, Keras, and Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit.”

 

Rob Broadhead

Rob is a founder of, and frequent contributor to, Develpreneur. This includes the Building Better Developers podcast. He is also a lifetime learner as a developer, designer, and manager of software solutions. Rob is the founder of RB Consulting and has managed to author a book about his family experiences and a few about becoming a better developer. In his free time, he stays busy raising five children (although they have grown into adults). When he has a chance to breathe, he is on the ice playing hockey to relax or working on his ballroom dance skills.

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