Amazon Lex launches support for Japanese

We are delighted to announce that [Amazon Lex](/lex/) now supports Japanese. Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text. Amazon Lex provides deep learning powered automatic speech recognition (ASR) for converting speech to text and natural language understanding (NLU) capabilities to recognize the intent of the text, enabling you to build applications with lifelike conversational interactions. Now you can deliver a robust and localized conversational experience that understands Japanese. You can also respond to users with natural sounding Amazon Polly Japanese voices and provide a fully localized, voice experience. The conversational interfaces built on Amazon Lex can be applied to a variety of use cases such as interactive voice response systems, self-service chatbots, and application bots. Amazon Lex also provides pre-defined slots that are localized to capture information such as common Japanese names and cities. Japanese is available in all [AWS Regions](/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regional-product-services/) where [Amazon Lex](/lex/) operates. To learn more, visit the Amazon Lex [documentation](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lexv2/latest/dg/what-is.html) page.