Dive Brief:

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) is working on a suite of tools for businesses that would allow them to build their own customer service programs using bots and voice control, according to The Information.

• The new service would use Amazon's virtual assistant Alexa to respond to questions over the phone or via text, its Lex chatbot building service and its text-to-speech program Polly. It also would include deep learning capabilities allowing those tools to learn about and adapt to various industries.

• The new products could be announced as soon as mid-March, according to The Information. AWS has already started floating the idea with insurance providers and healthcare companies.

Dive Insight:

Customer contact centers are expected to be one of the first areas to see widespread automation, and several companies, including Spoken, Cisco, Avaya and Genesys have shown interest in providing technologies to help automate the call center industry.

Forrester recently predicted one-quarter of all job tasks will be assigned to "software robots, physical robots or customer self-service automation" by 2019.

AWS is working to diversify its enterprise offerings. While the company is the leader in enterprise cloud, it’s other offerings are not as strong. The company is working to change that and test its mettle in other enterprise areas The Information recently reported that AWS is considering creating its own enterprise productivity suite to compete with similar tools from Microsoft and Google. AWS also recently launched Chime, a video conferencing service.