Amazon Cloud unit enters health care AI market, adds chatbot tools

By Dina Bass

Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud unit, determined to take on Microsoft and Google in the burgeoning market for generative artificial intelligence, has unveiled a range of new AI products, including a service that helps health care providers summarize doctor visits and software that let companies create their own chatbots. 
 

Amazon Web Services’ new HealthScribe summarizing tool has already attracted the interest of 3M Health Information Systems Inc., Babylon Health and ScribeEMR, said Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of database, analytics and machine learning, who announced the new products on Wednesday in New York. AWS is working with partners to get the technology into clinicians’ hands rather than selling its own product directly to hospitals or doctors, he said in an interview.

Companies are rushing to integrate generative AI into their businesses and automate a range of tasks currently handled by people. Microsoft Corp. and  Alphabet Inc.’s Google are both using the technology to revamp web search and add AI capabilities to a host of products. AWS, seen in some quarters as lagging behind its two smaller cloud rivals in generative AI, is trying to sell clients on its services and persuade them to run their own custom-built AI apps on AWS. 

The health care sector is already a significant battleground for generative AI. Microsoft, which acquired health AI company Nuance last year, is already using the technology underpinning ChatGPT to sell transcribing and  summarizing services to doctors and nurses. Google is working on  Med-PaLM, an AI model that researchers say has the potential to revolutionize health care by letting physicians retrieve medical knowledge in real time to support their clinical decisions. HealthScribe is available as a preview in the eastern US region, Amazon said.

AWS also announced it will be adding more business-intelligence tools to its QuickSight product, which competes with Microsoft’s PowerBI and Salesforce Inc.’s Tableau. Apart from easing the preparation of data dashboards, the new features will let customers use plain language to tell the software to create a slideshow or data story from particular graphs or dashboards, Sivasubramanian said. 

Customers who want to create chatbots or customer service agents can select one of several large language models used to train the AI algorithms. Amazon is also adding two large language models from the AI company Cohere to its Bedrock product, as well as the latest ones from Stability AI and Anthropic. AWS said customers such as Ryanair Holdings Plc and Bridgewater Associates are using Bedrock. The chatbot tools, called Agents for Bedrock, are available as a preview. 

AWS also made available a service that lets customers tap into the latest Nvidia Corp. chip for training AI models, the H100, a further attempt to lure more clients to run their AI apps in AWS’s data centers rather than with Microsoft or Google.