Amazon wants companies to build public-facing chatbots using its Q Business assistant.
On Wednesday, the company announced that Q Business, its AWS-hosted AI assistant that can answer questions, provide summaries, and complete tasks, now supports anonymous user access. This effectively means that AWS users can now create Q Business chatbots for websites, support portals, and more to help their customers search documentation, complete self-service requests, and so on.
“This capability allows guest users to use Amazon Q Business generative AI capabilities to quickly find product information, get technical answers, navigate documentation, and troubleshoot issues,” explains Amazon in a blog post. “With this new feature, you can now create Amazon Q Business applications with anonymous user mode, where user authentication is not required and content is publicly accessible.”
Customers can configure a Q Business chatbot to ingest support documents or other content to ground the bots’ response to queries. Q Business applications with anonymous access are billed on a consumption-based pricing model, says Amazon.
Amazon launched Q Business two years ago at its annual AWS re:Invent conference. Since then, the company has rebranded Q and introduced “agentic” features, including the ability for Q Business to perform tasks on behalf of users across third-party applications.
Amazon sees AI as increasingly core to its overall growth strategy. CEO Andy Jassy recently said the company is building more than 1,000 generative AI applications, and that Amazon’s AI revenue is growing at “triple-digit” year-over-year percentages and represents a “multi-billion-dollar annual revenue run rate.”
Kyle Wiggers is TechCrunch’s AI Editor. His writing has appeared in VentureBeat and Digital Trends, as well as a range of gadget blogs including Android Police, Android Authority, Droid-Life, and XDA-Developers. He lives in Manhattan with his partner, a music therapist.
