Amazon Lex – Conversational interfaces for your applications

You need intents so whatever code is running Lex knows to do something. Especially for a conversation string.

If you want text to speech or text to text? You'd make a polly utility, or do something like "open dictate" and then just capture everything said after.

That being said the duration is limited too.

I'm thinking it's a play on A(lex)a andlexical analysis[1]. That may be where Alexa got her name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_analysis

Lex Luther would be a killer name for a support library.

I'm waiting for Amazon Yak, for all your shaving needs. Or maybe yacc. For your syntax tree parsing needs.

Seriously though, Lex is an old school tokenizer for parsing problems.

"does anybody else think the only time they've ever heard of Lex is Lex Luther"

TBH, Lex Luthor is probably a better association than the spaceship Lexx. At least he doesn't make every household item into a not-even-disguised dick joke. :)

Lex who?

My only connotation for "Lex" is 'lexical analysis' and derived terms ('to lex', 'a lexeme', 'a lexer').

Yes, only US English. It's quite unfortunate that the most commonly spoken language on earth - Mandarin - has such poor speech recognition. Using Google Translate or Siri with Mandarin is almost useless. Hopefully people start throwing more resources towards Mandarin speech technology.