Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced the general availability of Amazon Kendra, an accurate and easy to use enterprise search service powered by machine learning.

With just a few clicks, Amazon Kendra uses machine learning to enable organizations to index all of their internal data sources, make that data searchable, and allow users to get precise answers to natural language queries. When users ask a question, Amazon Kendra uses machine learning algorithms to understand the context and return the most relevant results, whether that be a precise answer or an entire document.

Amazon Kendra requires no machine learning expertise and can be set up completely within the AWS Management Console. To get started with Amazon Kendra, visit https://aws.amazon.com/kendra/

Because natural language understanding is at the core of Amazon Kendra’s search engine, employees can run their searches using natural language (keywords still work, but most users prefer natural language searches). As an example, an employee can ask a specific question like “when does the IT help desk open?” and Amazon Kendra will give them a specific answer like “9:30 AM,” and highlight the passage in the source document where it found the answer, along with links back to the IT ticketing portal and other relevant sites. Amazon Kendra is also optimized to understand complex language from multiple domains, including IT (e.g. “How do I set up my VPN?”), healthcare and life sciences (e.g. “What is the genetic marker for ALS?”), and insurance (e.g. “How long does it take for policy changes to go into effect?"). Currently, Amazon Kendra supports industry-specific language from IT, healthcare, and insurance, plus energy, industrial, financial services, legal, media and entertainment, travel and hospitality, human resources, news, telecommunications, mining, food and beverage, and automotive, with additional industry support coming in the second half of this year.

Amazon Kendra encrypts data in transit and at rest and integrates with commonly used data repository types such as file systems, applications, Intranet, and relational databases, so developers can index their company’s content with just a few clicks, and provide end-users with highly accurate search without writing a single line of code. Amazon Kendra provides a wide range of native cloud and on-premises connectors to popular data sources such as SharePoint, OneDrive, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Amazon Simple Storage Service, and relational databases, with more being added throughout this year. Developers can add data sources to their Amazon Kendra search index by selecting the connector type, and those connectors will maintain document access rights. Data connectors can be scheduled to automatically sync between the index and data sources to ensure end-users are always searching the most up to date content.

Amazon Kendra is available today in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and EU West (Ireland), with other regions coming soon.