What is Amazon Kendra?

Amazon Kendra is an intelligent search service that uses natural language processing and advanced machine learning algorithms to return specific answers to search questions from your data.

Unlike traditional keyword-based search, Amazon Kendra uses its semantic and contextual understanding capabilities to decide whether a document is relevant to a search query. It returns specific answers to questions, giving users an experience that's close to interacting with a human expert.

Note

You can also use Amazon Kendra's semantic search capabilities to re-rank another search service's results. See Amazon Kendra Intelligent Ranking for more details.

With Amazon Kendra, you can create a unified search experience by connecting multiple data repositories to an index and ingesting and crawling documents. You can use your document metadata to create a feature-rich and customized search experience for your users, helping them efficiently find the right answers to their queries.

Querying Amazon Kendra

You can ask Amazon Kendra the following types of queries:

Factoid questions—Simple who, what, when, or where questions, such as Where is the nearest service center to Seattle? Factoid questions have fact-based answers that can be returned as a single word or phrase. The answer is retrieved from a FAQ or from your indexed documents.

Descriptive questions—Questions where the answer could be a sentence, passage, or an entire document. For example, How do I connect my Echo Plus to my network? Or, How do I get tax benefits for lower income families?

Keyword and natural language questions—Questions that include complex, conversational content where the meaning may not be clear. For example, keynote address. When Amazon Kendra encounters a word like "address", which has multiple contextual meanings, it correctly infers the meaning behind the search query and returns relevant information.

Benefits of Amazon Kendra

Amazon Kendra is highly scalable, capable of meeting performance demands, is tightly integrated with other AWS services such as Amazon S3 and Amazon Lex, and offers enterprise-grade security. Some of the benefits of using Amazon Kendra include:

Simplicity—Amazon Kendra provides a console and API for managing the documents that you want to search. You can use a simple search API to integrate Amazon Kendra into your client applications, such as websites or mobile applications.

Connectivity—Amazon Kendra can connect to third-party data repositories or data sources such as Microsoft SharePoint. You can easily index and search your documents using your data source.

Accuracy—Unlike traditional search services that use keyword searches, Amazon Kendra attempts to understand the context of the question and returns the most relevant word, snippet, or document for your query. Amazon Kendra uses machine learning to improve search results over time.

Security—Amazon Kendra delivers a highly secure enterprise search experience. Your search results reflect the security model of your organization and can be filtered based on the user or group access to documents. Customers are responsible for authenticating and authorizing user access.

Amazon Kendra Editions

Amazon Kendra has two versions: Developer Edition and Enterprise Edition. The following table outlines their features and the differences between the two.

Amazon Kendra Developer Edition

Amazon Kendra Enterprise Edition

Amazon Kendra Developer Edition provides all of the features of Amazon Kendra at a lower cost. Ideal use case Exploring how Amazon Kendra indexes your documents Trying out features Developing applications that use Amazon Kendra Features A free tier with 750 hours of use included Up to 5 indexes with up to 5 data sources each 10,000 documents or 3 GB of extracted text Approximately 4,000 queries per day or 0.05 queries per second Runs in 1 Availability Zone (AZ)—see Availability Zones (data centers in AWS regions) Limitations Not for production applications No guarantees of latency or availability

Amazon Kendra Enterprise Edition provides all of the features of Amazon Kendra and is designed for production contexts. Ideal use case Indexing your entire enterprise document library Deploying your application in a production environment Features Up to 5 indexes with up to 50 data sources each 100,000 documents or 30 GB of extracted text Approximately 8,000 queries per day or 0.1 queries per second Runs in 3 Availability Zones (AZ)—see Availability Zones (data centers in AWS regions) Note You can increase this quota using the Service Quotas console. Limitations None

Note

For a list of regions, endpoints, and service quotas supported by Amazon Kendra, see Amazon Kendra endpoints and quotas.

Pricing for Amazon Kendra

You can get started for free with the Amazon Kendra Developer Edition that provides usage of up to 750 hours for the first 30 days.

After your trial expires, you are charged for all provisioned Amazon Kendra indexes, even if they are empty and no queries are run. After the trial expires, there are additional charges for scanning and syncing documents using the Amazon Kendra data sources.

For a complete list of charges and prices, see Amazon Kendra pricing.

Are you a first-time Amazon Kendra user?

If you are a first-time user of Amazon Kendra, we recommend that you read the following sections in order:

1 How Amazon Kendra works	2 Getting started	3 Creating an index	4 Adding documents directly to an index with batch upload	5 Creating a data source connector	6 Searching an index
Introduces Amazon Kendra components and describes how you use them to create a search solution.	Explains how to set up your account and test the Amazon Kendra search API.	Explains how to use Amazon Kendra to create a search index and to add data sources to sync your documents.	Explains how to add documents directly to an Amazon Kendra index.	Explains how to add documents from your data repository to an Amazon Kendra index.	Explains how to use the Amazon Kendra search API to search an index.