Launch of Amazon Rekognition, Polly, Lex

AWS unveiled its first set of high-level AI services: Rekognition for image/video analysis, Polly for text-to-speech, and Lex for conversational AI. These demonstrated AWS's commitment to AI.

Significance

These services showed Amazon's growing investment in AI beyond just infrastructure and laid groundwork for more comprehensive ML offerings by demonstrating Amazon's own AI capabilities.