AWS's strange AI-powered keyboard experiment, DeepComposer, is not any more.
In a Blog post Today, the corporate announced that it’s discontinuing five-year-old DeepComposer, a physical MIDI piano and AWS service that allowed users to compose songs using generative AI.
“After careful consideration, we have now made the choice to finish support for AWS DeepComposer,” wrote Kanchan Jagannathan, program manager for AWS AI Devices. “If you’ve gotten data stored on the AWS DeepComposer console, you’ll be able to proceed to make use of AWS DeepComposer as usual until September 17, 2025, when support for the service will end.”
Introduced at AWS's annual re:Invent conference in 2019, DeepComposer was a 32-key, two-octave MIDI keyboard and collection of tools for AI-powered music generation. AWS quite bombastically called it “the world's first machine-learning-enabled music keyboard for developers.”
The AWS DeepComposer service allowed users to record a melody using the physical keyboard or on-screen keys, select a genre-specific music generation model, and let DeepComposer create a whole song. The finished track might be played within the AWS console or exported and shared on SoundCloud.
DeepComposer was originally a developer-only product, but was introduced to all AWS customers in 2020. The MIDI keyboard cost $99.
There were mixed opinions in regards to the usability and musicality of DeepComposer. Many Reviewers of the MIDI keyboard complained that they couldn't get the keys to work and that the AI instrumentation left lots to be desired.
My colleague Frederic Lardinois was similarly disillusioned when he tried DeepComposer in 2019. But as he noted in his article, DeepComposer was all the time intended as a learning tool quite than a tool for writing the following Top 40 song—very similar to other AWS AI devices just like the DeepLens camera and the DeepRacer AI automobile, each of which AWS also discontinued lately (though DeepRacer lives on). practical).
