Speech recognition is one of the most difficult aspects of programming and, at the same time, one of the most desirable features of new-age applications. One of the potential implementations is using speech recognition in call-centers systems to automate the mundane work of operators.

The main question is how to make a machine understand natural language, transform it into text, and return an adequate response? Many development companies such as Google, Amazon, IBM, Apple, and Microsoft are now highly involved in the creation of the best mechanisms to cope with these tasks. Thus, some time ago Amazon announced a service for creating conversational interfaces for applications - Amazon Lex.

Actually, we actively use AWS products in many of our projects and know their specifics, so, in spite of the fact that Lex was still quite raw (new and poorly documented), we were determined to crack it. We hoped that this would be one more positive story that would give us more points toward our overall expertise score.

However, our experience turned out to be quite controversial. If you plan to use Lex for your automatic speech recognition (ASR) bot, you may find it helpful to read this article. We would like to caution you.