Amazon Web Services Inc. today made its Amazon Q generative artificial intelligence assistant generally available for developers and business users that will allow them to debug code and automate business tasks.

 Alongside these announcements, the company also unveiled a new Amazon Q Apps feature, in preview, that will allow noncoders to create applications with conversational prompts.

AWS unveiled Amazon Q in November in preview for developers and information technology professionals as an AI assistant that could provide help getting started on projects, building applications in AWS, researching best practices, coding new features, troubleshooting networking issues or getting recommendations. Since it resides within the same tools that professionals use, all of this can be done without leaving the editor or the console.

“Amazon Q is the most capable generative AI-powered assistant available today with industry-leading accuracy, advanced agent capabilities, and best-in-class security that helps developers become more productive and helps business users to accelerate decision making,” said Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of artificial intelligence and data at AWS. “Since we announced the service at re:Invent, we have been amazed at the productivity gains developers and business users have seen.”

Amazon’s unveiling of Q has been part of the company’s foray into a generative AI business and coding assistant and rival to existing enterprise-ready chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise, Microsoft Corp.’s Copilot for 365 and Google LLC’s Gemini for Workspace, all of which have AI assistants for organizations.

Amazon Q Developer works alongside developers and IT professionals where it acts as a coding assistant within integrated coding environments, which are applications that assist with editing and developing code. That means it can be used for creating blocks of code or refactoring it using a conversational experience. The assistant can also be used to explain what a section of code does or help improve the application by suggesting a new function such as database access, and it can even add it directly to the code on request.

IT professionals can call up Q within the AWS console and ask questions about how to use the service, and what interfaces are available, and receive recommendations. That can be easier than attempting to switch out to search for information when the assistant is right there to work with them.

Business users get access to Amazon Q Business, which has secure access to all of an organization’s enterprise data, helping employees be more prepared and productive. In today’s launch, Amazon unveiled several new features including custom plugins and Amazon Q Apps, a generative AI-powered builder for customized applications.

With Q, employees get an AI assistant that can answer questions, provide summaries of documents, generate content and complete tasks based on enterprise data within enterprise systems. Amazon said Q maintains secure access to all enterprise data and can also interact with products such as QuickSight, AWS’ unified cloud business intelligence service, to help users quickly build BI dashboards and create visualizations for complex calculations.

Using Amazon Q Apps, business users and those with no coding experience can simply describe the app they want in a conversation with Amazon Q Business and it will convert that into a working application. Since Q has access to the company’s enterprise data and can help users solve problems within their own company, it can quickly take what it had previously worked on and turn that into a workflow that can be shared throughout the organization.

There is no need to understand any underlying code or programming. The Q Apps AI assistant will do the heavy lifting and building work. For example, users can write a plain language prompt to make a grammar editor and spell checker for documents and use a company’s internal style guidelines. The Apps assistant will then produce an application that would take an upload and provide edit suggestions.

Images: AWS