Using Amazon Kendra to help answer 10th (and 12th) standard science questions for my daughter ..

5 min readMay 20, 2020

This is a very short blog, with lots of screenshots and very less write-up.

Update: December 22nd 2022

When I wrote the blog in 2020, Amazon Kendra had just released, COVID lockdowns had started (are they starting again now? ) and I played around with a fun use-case with our eldest daughter’s 10th grade books to generate some “specific answers to questions, giving users an experience that’s close to interacting with a human expert”. Now, our daughter is in 12th grade (need your blessings :-) ) and many things have changed:

Amazon Kendra is also now available in AWS Asia Pacific Mumbai region, and many other regions — yeah !!! — https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/12/amazon-kendra-asia-pacific-mumbai-aws-region/
Amazon Kendra has added so many new features — built-in connectors for some many data source — Amazon S3, Microsoft SharePoint, Confluence, Slack, Jira, Google drive and so many others, including a web crawler to crawl and index webpages — https://docs.aws.amazon.com/kendra/latest/dg/hiw-data-source.html
Amazon Kendra Experience Builder helps you build and deploy a fully functional search application, with no code

and many others

While, I did a more simplistic use-case in 2020, customers have leveraged Kendra for several use-case like:

Contact center or Help desk agents for answering more-relevant answers from unstructured data including FAQs
Embed search within your applications
Kendra uses ML to continuously optimize search results based on end-user search patterns and feedback
and many more —

You can get started with the se resources — https://aws.amazon.com/kendra/resources/?blog-cards.sort-by=item.additionalFields.createdDate&blog-cards.sort-order=desc and this workshop — https://catalog.us-east-1.prod.workshops.aws/workshops/df64824d-abbe-4b0d-8b31-8752bceabade/en-US

— — end of update —

Amazon Kendra from AWS, is a highly accurate and easy to use enterprise search service that’s powered by machine learning. Its biggest USP, according to me, is that it supports natural language search and returns the most useful/actionable results. It became generally available to everyone recently — https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/05/amazon-kendra-is-now-generally-available/

Well, here comes my requirement - with the COVID-19 epidemic looming large in our lives and most of us are working from home and also helping kids (or trying to help) with their studies ;-) My elder one has just started 10th standard and with my age catching up and declining grey matter, its very difficult for me to help her with core subjects like Science and I need help. When I saw what Kendra can accomplish, I wanted to try something quickly, and test whether Amazon Kendra can help answer some of her questions in Science using her CBSE board textbooks from 8th to 10th grade that are available from the CBSE board as pdf documents !!

Believe me, I never had to refer to the documentation and the AWS console is so intuitive. But if you need to, you can refer to the documentation at https://docs.aws.amazon.com/kendra/

Step 1:

There are no servers to configure, you just need to create an Index, use an existing IAM role or create a new role and there are a bunch of default settings ..

It takes sometime to create this index

Step 2

You need to specify a Data source, for me the data source was an S3 bucket. I created an S3 bucket (should NOT be public) and uploaded my pdf documents there. The science text books are available in pdf format at the NCERT website at http://ncert.nic.in/textbook/textbook.htm

In Kendra, you need to specify a Data source and in our case, its an S3 bucket. It currently supports several data sources including Amazon RDS and several other external Data sources as shown below.