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When we launched Amazon Q Business in April 2024, we also previewed Amazon Q Apps, a capability within Amazon Q Business that enables users to create apps powered by generative artificial intelligence (Generative AI) based on their organization's data. Users can build apps using natural language and securely publish them to their organization's app library for anyone to use.
After collecting your feedback and suggestions during the preview period, today we are releasing the Amazon Q App to general availability. We are also adding several new features that were not available during the preview period, including the Amazon Q App API and the ability to specify data sources at the individual card level.
We'll talk more about the new features later, but first let's look at how to get started with the Amazon Q app.
Convert conversations into reusable apps
The Amazon Q app allows users to generate apps from conversations with Amazon Q Business. The Amazon Q app intelligently captures the context of the conversation and generates an app tailored to your specific needs. Let's see it in action:
When I started writing this article, I thought about creating a product overview for the Amazon Q app with the help of Amazon Q Business. After all, Amazon Q Business is all about making employees more productive. So I uploaded my product messaging documents to an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket and added it as a data source using the Amazon S3 connector in Amazon Q Business.
I start the conversation with a prompt like this:
I am writing a post about the release of the Amazon Q app.
Here's a brief description of the product: Employees can create lightweight, purpose-built Amazon Q apps within the broader Amazon Q Business application environment.
Generate an overview of your product and list its key features.
After starting the conversation, I realized that creating a product overview based on the product description would also be useful for others in the organization. Create an Amazon Q app Create reusable, shareable apps.
Amazon Q Business automatically generates prompts for you to create an Amazon Q app, and provides prompts for you to review and edit as needed.
Leveraging the data Q knows about products/services, we will build an app that takes a short text description of a product or service and outputs a summary of that product/service and a list of its main features.
I choose Generate Continue creating the app. You will now have a Product Summary Generator app with four cards: two input cards to get user input, and two output cards to display a summary of the product and its key features.
You can adjust the layout of your app by resizing and moving cards.
Additionally, prompts for individual text output cards are automatically generated and can be viewed or edited. Product Overview When you click on a card, a prompt appears in the side panel.
The side panel also allows you to select the source of the text output card to generate the output using either Large Scale Language Model (LLM) knowledge or approved data sources. For approved data sources, you can select one or more data sources that have been configured for this Amazon Q Business application. Marketing (Amazon S3) The data source you configured to create this app.
As you can see, we generated a fully functional app from the conversation itself, with no changes to the base prompts or to the prompts for the individual text output cards.
To publish this app to your organization's App Library, ReleaseHowever, before publishing the app, let's look at an alternative way to create an Amazon Q app.
Use natural language to create generative AI apps
Instead of using the Amazon Q Business conversation as a starting point for building an app, Apps Describe in your own words the app you want to build, or you can try one of the pre-set example prompts.
You can enter and select the prompts that suit your needs. Generate Create the app.
Share the app with your team
Once you are happy with both the layout and prompts and are ready to share your app, you can publish it to the centralized app library so that it is accessible to all users of this Amazon Q Business application environment.
Amazon Q Apps inherit the robust security and governance controls from Amazon Q Business, ensuring that data sources, user permissions, and guardrails are maintained, so when other users run the app, they will only see responses that are based on the data they have access to in the underlying data sources.
In the product overview generator app I created, ReleaseYou'll see a preview of the app and the option to select up to three labels. Labels are useful for categorizing apps by departments or other categories within your organization. After you select the labels, Release Click again on the preview popup.
Your app will be immediately available in the Amazon Q app library for others to use, copy, and build on. library Browse the Amazon Q app library and find the Product Summary Generator app.
Customize apps to your specific needs with the App Library
Amazon Q Apps enables users to quickly scale personal or team productivity by customizing and tailoring shared apps to their specific needs. Instead of starting from scratch, users can review existing apps and use them as is, or modify them and publish their own versions to the App Library.
Browse your App Library to find the app you want to customize. Select a label. general Search for apps in that category.
I Document Editing Assistant An app that reviews documents and corrects grammatical mistakes. I want to create a new version of the app that also includes an overview of the document. Let's see how we can achieve this.
I choose Openwhen you open the app, Customization.
I choose CustomizationThis will create a copy of the app that you can then modify.
Will update title and explanation Select the edit icon on the app's title to edit the app.
You can see the original App Prompt These are the prompts that were used to generate this app. You can use these prompts as a starting point for creating a similar app by copying them, updating them to include descriptions of the features you want to add, and letting Amazon Q Apps Creator do the work for you. Or, you can continue to modify your copy of this app.
You have the option to edit or delete an existing card. For example, Text output of edited document Edit a card by selecting the edit icon on the card.
To add more functionality, you can add cards for user input, text output, file upload, administrator pre-configured plugins, etc. For example, the File Upload card allows you to provide a file as another data source to refine or fine-tune the answer to a question, while the Plugin card, for example, allows you to create a Jira ticket for an action item that needs to be taken as a follow-up.
I choose Text Output Add a new card to summarize the document. Enter “Document Summary” as the title and the following prompt:
Summarize the main points of the @Upload Document in a few sentences
You can now publish this customized app as a new app and share it with everyone in your organization.
What did you add after previewing it?
As I mentioned earlier, we've been adding new features based on your feedback and suggestions during the preview period. These new features include:
Specifying the Data Source at the Card Level – As shown while creating the app, you can specify the data source that generates the output. This feature has been added to improve the accuracy of the response.
An Amazon Q Business instance can have multiple data sources. However, you might only need a subset of these data sources to build your app, based on your use case. Therefore, you can now select a specific data source for each text output card in your app. Alternatively, you can configure the text output card to use LLM knowledge instead of using a data source, if your use case requires it.
Amazon Q App API – You can now create and manage Amazon Q apps programmatically with APIs for managing apps, app libraries, and app sessions, enabling you to integrate the full capabilities of Amazon Q apps into the tools and applications of your choice.
Things you need to know:
- region – The Amazon Q app is generally available starting today in the US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) regions, where Amazon Q Business is available.
- price – The Amazon Q app is available with an Amazon Business Pro subscription ($20 per user per month), giving users access to all the features of Amazon Q Business.
- Learning Resources – For more information, see the Amazon Q App in the Amazon Q Business User Guide.
– Prasad
