Amazon announces general availability of Amazon Personalize, an AI-based recommendation service

Two days ago, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced in a press release that Amazon Personalize will now be generally available to all customers. Until now, this machine learning technology was used by Amazon.com for AWS customers to use in their applications.

https://twitter.com/jeffbarr/status/1138430113589022721

Amazon Personalize basically helps developers easily add custom machine learning models into their applications, such as personalized product and content recommendations, tailored search results, and targeted marketing promotions, even if they don’t have machine learning experience. It is a fully managed service that trains, tunes, and deploys custom, private machine learning models. Customers have to pay for only what they use, with no minimum fees or upfront commitments.

Amazon has been using Personalize for processing and examining the data, to identify what is meaningful, to select from multiple built advanced algorithms for their retail business, and for training and optimizing a personalization model customized to their data. All this is done, while keeping the customers data completely private. Customers receive results via an Application Programming Interface (API).

Now,with the general availability of Amazon Personalize, many application developers and data scientists at businesses of all sizes across all industries, will be able to use and implement the power of Amazon’s expertise in machine learning.

Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of Machine Learning, Amazon Web Services said “Customers have been asking for Amazon Personalize, and we are eager to see how they implement these services to delight their own end users. And the best part is that these artificial intelligence services, like Amazon Personalize, do not require any machine learning experience to immediately train, tune, and deploy models to meet their business demands”.

Amazon Personalize will now be available in US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Singapore) and EU (Ireland). Amazon charges five cents per GB of data uploaded to Personalize and 24 cents per training hour used to train a custom model. Real-time recommendation requests are priced based on how many requests are uploaded, with discounts for larger orders.

Customers who have already added Amazon Personalize to their apps include Yamaha Corporation of America, Subway, Zola and Segment. In the press release, Ishwar Bharbhari, Director of Information Technology, Yamaha Corporation of America, said “Amazon Personalize saves us up to 60% of the time needed to set up and tune the infrastructure and algorithms for our machine learning models when compared to building and configuring the environment on our own. It is ideal for both small developer teams who are trying to build the case for ML and large teams who are trying to iterate rapidly at reasonable cost. Even better, we expect Amazon Personalize to be more accurate than other recommender systems, allowing us to delight our customers with highly personalized product suggestions during their shopping experience, which we believe will increase our average order value and the total number of orders”.

Developers are of course excited, that they can finally implement Amazon Personalize in their applications.

https://twitter.com/TheNickWalsh/status/1138243004127334400

https://twitter.com/SubkrishnaRao/status/1138742140996112384

https://twitter.com/PatrickMoorhead/status/1138228634924212229

To get started with Amazon Personalize, head over to this blog post by Julien Simon.