Product Overview: AWS Kendra
What is Amazon Kendra?
Amazon Kendra is a highly accurate and easy-to-use enterprise search service powered by machine learning (ML) and natural language processing. It is designed to help developers and organizations add intelligent search capabilities to their applications, enabling end users to discover information stored across various content repositories within the company.
Key Features and Functionality
Intelligent Search Capabilities
Amazon Kendra goes beyond traditional keyword-based search by using semantic and contextual similarity to understand the context of user queries. It returns the most relevant results, whether that means a precise answer, a snippet, or an entire document. This is achieved through advanced deep learning models that improve search results over time.
Connectivity to Multiple Data Sources
Kendra offers easy-to-use native connectors to popular data repositories such as Amazon S3, Microsoft SharePoint, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Microsoft OneDrive, and more. It also supports custom data source connectors, allowing integration with specialized repositories. This connectivity enables organizations to index and search documents from a wide range of sources.
Data Ingestion and Indexing
The service provides two methods for keeping the index up to date: automated scheduling through connectors and the ability to build custom connectors using the Amazon Kendra API. This ensures that the search index remains current with the source data repositories. Additionally, Kendra offers features like Custom Document Enrichment to pre-process documents before indexing.
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and Generative AI
Amazon Kendra GenAI Index enhances the service by integrating with large language models (LLMs) to create generative AI-powered conversational experiences. This combines a retriever with an LLM to generate responses, leveraging Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to find relevant documents based on user queries. This integration is seamless with other AWS services like Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases and Amazon Q Business.
Security and Scalability
Kendra delivers a highly secure enterprise search experience, with all customer data encrypted and integrated with AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) for secure access. The service is also highly scalable, capable of meeting performance demands and ensuring that search results reflect the organization’s security model.
User-Friendly Implementation
Amazon Kendra provides a console and API for managing documents, making it simple to integrate into client applications such as websites or mobile apps. The Experience Builder offers a WYSIWYG UI search application builder, allowing users to create fully functional and customizable search applications without requiring coding. Code samples and SDKs are also available for more flexibility.
Domain Expertise
Kendra is pre-trained on 14 domains, including financial services, healthcare, life sciences, IT, and energy, ensuring high accuracy out of the box regardless of the domain the content focuses on.
In summary, Amazon Kendra is a powerful enterprise search service that leverages ML and natural language processing to provide accurate and contextually relevant search results. Its broad connectivity options, automated data ingestion, integration with generative AI, and robust security features make it an invaluable tool for organizations seeking to enhance their search capabilities.