Part of its Amazon Q Business offering, Amazon Q Apps enable the creation of generative AI-powered apps that integrate enterprise data that can be shared securely within an organization. Along with their general availability, Amazon announced new APIs for Amazon Q Apps and more granular data source definitions.
Amazon Q Apps are purpose-built, lightweight AI-powered apps running within the Amazon Q Business application environment that can tap into an organization's data. According to Amazon, Q Apps can be created easily by transforming conversations with the Q Business assistant into reusable and shareable Web services.
Users can also publish apps to the admin-managed library and share them with their coworkers. Amazon Q Apps inherit user permissions, access controls, and enterprise guardrails from Amazon Q Business for secure sharing and adherence to data governance policies.
AWS principal partner solutions architect Prasad Rao described how you can create a "Product Overview Generator" app step by step, starting with a PDF document uploaded to an S3 bucket. The app includes four cards, i.e., two inputs, the product name and the product description, and two outputs, a product overview and a list of key features.
A new feature debuting in the GA release is the ability to specify data sources at the card level. This can be useful, for example, if you want to use only a subset of the available data to generate a given output.
Additionally, published apps can be run as-is or modified and re-published as a different app. To this aim, users can review the original app prompt, as well as add or remove data sources to improve output quality.
Finally, Amazon introduced an API to create and manage Q Apps programmatically. This makes it possible to integrate Q Apps into existing tools or development environments to create and consume their outputs.
Amazon introduced its Q Business generative-AI assistant a few months ago to securely integrate enterprise data with a system able to answer questions, provide summaries, generate content, and complete tasks. Q Apps were introduced at the same time in preview and made available to all Q Business users, including both Pro and Lite users. With the official release of Q Apps, Amazon is taking the opportunity to change this and requiring that all Lite users upgrade to Amazon Q Business Pro if they want to keep using their Q Apps. Additionally, Lite users who created Q Apps that are still unpublished should be aware that, if they do not upgrade to Amazon Q Business Pro, their Q Apps will be deleted at the end of August.