Amazon Q
Amazon Q is a new generative AI-powered assistant developed by Amazon Web Services (AWS) for business applications. This assistant is desig...
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What is Amazon Q?
Amazon Q is a generative AI-powered assistant designed for work that can be tailored to your business. You can use Amazon Q to have conversations, solve problems, generate content, gain insights, and take action by connecting to your company's information repositories, code, data, and enterprise systems. Amazon Q provides immediate, relevant information and advice to employees to streamline tasks, accelerate decision-making and problem-solving, and help spark creativity and innovation at work.
Amazon Q offers specialized capabilities for different user roles. For general business users, it can transform press releases into blog posts, create summaries, generate email drafts, create tailored social media prompts, and analyze campaign results. For developers and IT professionals, it provides generative AI-powered assistance for research, design, development, testing, and maintenance tasks. Business analysts can use Amazon Q in QuickSight for quicker, easier data insights, and contact center agents can use it in Amazon Connect for improved service.
Amazon Q can adapt its interactions to each individual user based on the existing identities, roles, and permissions of your business. It searches through company content including internal style guides to provide responses appropriate to your company's brand standards. The assistant provides citations and references to original sources for fact-checking and traceability, and you can choose among 40+ built-in connectors for popular data sources and enterprise systems including Amazon S3, Google Drive, Microsoft SharePoint, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Slack.
Amazon Q pricing
Pricing model: Free
Amazon Q Business offers two subscription models: Amazon Q Business Lite at $3 per user/month providing basic functionality like asking questions and receiving permission-aware responses, and Amazon Q Business Pro at $20 per user/month providing the full suite including Amazon Q Apps and Amazon Q in QuickSight (Reader Pro). Amazon Q Developer has a perpetual Free Tier with monthly limits including 50 agentic chat interactions per month and up to 1,000 lines of code transformation per month, plus a Pro Tier at $19 per user/month offering enterprise access controls, code base customization, and high limits of advanced features. Amazon Q in QuickSight has Author at $24 per user/month, Author Pro at $50 per user/month, Reader at $3 per user/month, and Reader Pro at $20 per user/month. Amazon Q in Connect is pay-as-you-go at $0.0015 per chat message and $0.0080 per voice minute.
Amazon Q pros
- Connects to 40+ built-in connectors for popular data sources and enterprise systems
- Provides citations and references to original sources for fact-checking
- Adapts interactions based on employee identities, roles, and permissions
- AWS never uses customer content from Amazon Q to train underlying models
- Fine-grained access controls restrict responses to data user has access to
- Can restrict responses to trusted company information only to mitigate hallucinations
- Integrates with Slack, Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Word, and browser extensions
- Creates custom Amazon Q Apps powered by generative AI based on enterprise data
- Supports Amazon Q in QuickSight for natural language queries on data
- Available in Amazon Connect for contact center agents with suggested solutions
- Provides permission-aware responses based on user access levels
- Can generate document summaries and create or compare documents
- Supports audio and video file analysis including meeting recordings
- Can surface answers from images embedded in documents like diagrams and charts
- HIPAA eligible for healthcare and life sciences organizations
- Personalization capabilities automatically enabled using employee profile data
- Supports incremental data synchronization for connected data sources
Amazon Q cons
- Only optimized to respond in English language
- Available in preview only in US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) regions initially
- Requires SAML 2.0 compliant external identity provider for authentication
- Cannot choose your own large language model - uses Amazon Bedrock foundation models
- Data sync can take from a few minutes to a few hours depending on data size
- Conversation history automatically saved for only one month
- Administers must create separate application environments to restrict access to specific organizational units
- Pro subscription required to prevent content from being used for service improvement
Frequently asked questions about Amazon Q
What is Amazon Q Business?
Amazon Q Business is the most capable generative AI-powered assistant for finding information, gaining insight, and taking action at work. It can answer questions, provide summaries, generate content, and securely complete tasks based on data and information in your enterprise systems.
How do I get started with Amazon Q Business?
To get started, navigate to Amazon Q Business in the AWS Management Console. Find details in the technical documentation. You can create an application by providing an application name, selecting or creating an AWS IAM service role, choosing a retriever (Amazon Q native retriever or Amazon Kendra retriever), and connecting data sources.
How does an end user interact with Amazon Q Business?
Amazon Q Business comes with a built-in user interface where users can ask complex questions in natural language, create or compare documents, generate document summaries, and interact with third-party applications. End users can engage with Amazon Q Business on public webpages, employee intranets, and embed in software application's user interfaces.
How does Amazon Q Business handle security and ensure responses are based on enterprise data only?
Amazon Q Business supports access control for your data so users have access to the right content based on their permissions. You can integrate with external SAML 2.0-supported identity providers like Okta, Azure AD, and Ping Identity to manage user authentication. Administrators can configure Amazon Q Business to respond strictly from enterprise documents or allow external knowledge when answers aren't available in enterprise documents.
Which plugins are available for Amazon Q Business?
Amazon Q Business provides plugins to interact with popular third-party applications such as Jira, ServiceNow, Salesforce, PagerDuty, and more. Administrators can enable these plugins with a ready-to-use library of over 50 actions to their Amazon Q Business application.
Which file types does Amazon Q Business support?
Amazon Q Business supports many common document types and formats such as .PDF, .CSV, .DOCX, .HTML, .JSON, .PPT, audio, and video files. It can also surface answers from visual elements like diagrams, infographics, charts, and image-based content embedded within documents including PDF, Microsoft PowerPoint, Word, and Google Docs.
Can I choose my own large language model (LLM)?
No, however AWS uses various foundation models from Amazon Bedrock within Amazon Q Business. You cannot select your own custom LM.
What are Amazon Q Apps and how can users create apps?
Amazon Q Apps allows users to create custom apps powered by generative AI based on enterprise data in Amazon Q Business. Users can generate an app in a single step from conversations with Amazon Q Business by describing app requirements in natural language, or by creating a copy from a shared app.
Can I connect Amazon Q Business to other enterprise applications?
Yes, you can use prebuilt and custom plugins to connect to any third-party application to enable searching of real-time data such as stock prices, employee vacation balances, package locations, and more. Administrators can enable access to browser extensions for Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox, and integrations with Slack, Microsoft Outlook, Word for Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Teams.
Is Amazon Q Business eligible for HIPAA?
Yes, Amazon Q Business is a HIPAA eligible service, enabling healthcare and life sciences organizations to use it to run sensitive workloads regulated under the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).