Tag Archives: Amazon Connect

AWS Weekly Roundup: Local Zone in Athens, Claude Opus 5 on AWS, Lambda durable execution for .NET, and more (July 27, 2026)

Post Syndicated from Daniel Abib original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-weekly-roundup-july-27-2026/

Last week I had the privilege of spending three days in São Paulo with technical builders from across Latin America, brought together for a regional tech event full of deep-dive sessions, hands-on workshops, and conversations with customers and partners. What struck me most wasn’t any single session, it was the energy of a technical community that so rarely gets to be in the same room. People traded architecture ideas over coffee, sketched out solutions on whiteboards, and left with a longer list of things to try than they arrived with. It’s a good reminder that, for all the tooling we build, the community around it is what makes the technology stick.

That community spirit connects nicely to the week’s biggest infrastructure news, which is all about bringing AWS closer to where builders actually are.

Now, let’s get into this week’s AWS news…

Headlines
AWS Local Zone in Athens, Greece: AWS has opened a new Local Zone in Athens, Greece, the second Local Zone in EMEA with support for Amazon S3 and Amazon EBS Local Snapshots, so you can store and process data within Greece to help meet local data residency requirements. The Athens Local Zone supports Amazon EC2 (C7i, M7i, and R7i instances), Amazon S3 with the One Zone-Infrequent Access storage class, Amazon EBS, and Amazon ECS.

Athens, Greece skyline

AWS Local Zones place AWS infrastructure much closer to large population and industry hubs, enabling applications that require single-digit millisecond latency, such as real-time gaming, media production, and financial services, to run where end users actually are. For builders in Greece, you can now run latency-sensitive workloads locally while connecting seamlessly to the nearest AWS Region for services that don’t require low latency, giving you the flexibility to architect hybrid, latency-optimized applications without managing your own data center infrastructure. To learn more, visit AWS Global Infrastructure and Sustainability Blog post.

Last week’s launches
Here are some launches and updates from this past week that caught my attention:

  • Claude Opus 5 on AWS: You can use Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5, the most advanced Opus model yet, matching Claude Fable 5’s top-tier intelligence in many domains at Opus-tier pricing. Amazon Bedrock offers Claude Opus 5 with zero data retention (ZDR) enabled by default, giving you Opus’ top-tier intelligence while meeting your data governance requirements unlike Claude Fable 5. You have two ways to access Claude Opus 5: Amazon Bedrock and Claude Platform on AWS. To learn more, visit the deep dive blog post.
  • AWS Lambda durable execution SDK for .NET is now generally available: You can now build resilient, long-running workflows in C# using Lambda durable functions, without implementing custom progress tracking or integrating an external orchestration service. The SDK is a natural fit for multi-step applications like payment processing pipelines, AI agent orchestration, and human-in-the-loop approvals, it checkpoints progress automatically and can pause execution for up to a year. If you’re a .NET developer building serverless workflows, this removes a lot of the plumbing you used to write by hand.
  • Amazon Bedrock AgentCore now delivers unified observability with traces and logs in a single log group: Amazon Bedrock AgentCore now delivers agent traces and prompts to the same Amazon CloudWatch log group as your agent’s logs. Previously, telemetry was split across destinations, trace spans went to a shared log group while prompts, inputs, and outputs went to a separate one, so debugging a single agent invocation meant searching in multiple places. You can now debug an invocation in one place, and apply fine-grained access control and customer-managed key (CMK) encryption at the individual agent level.
  • Amazon Connect delivers more natural agentic voice experiences: Amazon Connect now supports more natural, human-sounding agentic voice experiences across 50+ languages, including Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Thai, with over 100 new voice options and conversational improvements that make AI interactions sound more fluid. Connect’s agentic self-service lets AI agents understand, reason, and take action across voice and digital channels, adapting to a customer’s tone and sentiment. You can now build contact center experiences that feel natural to callers in far more of the languages your customers actually speak.
  • Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio now supports Amazon OpenSearch: You can now query and analyze your search and log analytics data from Amazon OpenSearch directly alongside other data assets in Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio. With this connection, you can combine operational search data in OpenSearch with data from sources like Amazon Redshift, Amazon S3, and relational databases, all within a single, governed environment. It’s especially useful when you need to correlate analytical and operational workloads, such as joining application logs with transactional data to uncover insights.
  • Amazon CloudWatch announces coding agent insights: Amazon CloudWatch now gives engineering leaders visibility into how AI coding tools are driving value across their organization. Coding agent insights integrates with the Claude apps gateway for AWS to collect telemetry from Claude Code without additional instrumentation, and also supports agents like Codex and GitHub Copilot. As teams scale AI coding adoption, you can now measure the return on that investment with metrics built on OpenTelemetry, no custom instrumentation required.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New with AWS page.

Other AWS news
Here are some additional posts and resources that you might find interesting:

Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendar and sign up for upcoming AWS events:

  • AWS Summits: AWS Summits are free events that bring the cloud and AI community together to connect, learn, and explore the latest technologies. Browse the full calendar to find a Summit near you in the second half of 2026.
  • AWS Community Days: Community-led conferences where content is planned, sourced, and delivered by community leaders. If you’re in Latin America, don’t miss AWS Community Day Belo Horizonte on August 22, registration is open at awscommunityday.com.br.

Join the AWS Builder Center to connect with builders, share solutions, and access content that supports your development. Browse here for upcoming AWS-led in-person and virtual events and developer-focused events.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

This post is part of our Weekly Roundup series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!

Scaling oncology patient support: How New York Cancer and Blood Specialists transformed customer experience with AWS and Pronetx, now part of Caylent

Post Syndicated from Muni T. Bondu original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/scaling-oncology-patient-support-how-new-york-cancer-and-blood-specialists-transformed-customer-experience-with-aws-and-pronetx-now-part-of-caylent/

As one of the United States’ leading oncology and hematology providers, the goal of New York Cancer and Blood Specialists (NYCBS) is to provide comprehensive and compassionate care to patients. The organization handles more than 250,000 patient calls every year across over 100 specialized queues and wanted to optimize its manual call handling process.

This post details how NYCBS partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and AWS partner Pronetx (now part of Caylent) to migrate to Amazon Connect Customer, the AWS cloud contact center service. The migration delivered a 54 percent improvement in patient enrollment and transformed the way NYCBS connects with the patients who need them most.

Solution overview

NYCBS chose to migrate to a dedicated Amazon Connect Customer instance with the help of Pronetx, an AWS partner specializing in Amazon Connect Customer. The 13-week engagement covered three phases: discovery and foundation (2 weeks), build and implementation (8 weeks), and acceptance testing and go-live (3 weeks).

This solution uses Amazon Connect Customer as the core contact center service. At the heart of the customer experience infrastructure lies the call routing and patient communication logic. Within this infrastructure, several key components work together to deliver HIPAA-compliant patient care.

Architecture

The architecture has three main layers, as shown in the following diagram. Each layer is designed to handle a specific aspect of the customer experience operations of NYCBS while maintaining HIPAA compliance throughout.

Architecture diagram showing the three-layer NYCBS contact center solution built on Amazon Connect. The diagram illustrates: (1) CTR management microservice with Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, and Amazon DynamoDB; (2) core contact center services with Amazon Connect instance, AWS Secrets Manager, Amazon Polly, and IVR Lambda functions; (3) call recording and AI/ML pipeline with Amazon S3, Amazon Transcribe, and Amazon Lex. Shared AWS services include AWS CloudFormation, AWS IAM, AWS KMS, Amazon CloudWatch, and Amazon SNS. External integrations include Microsoft Intune ID and NYCBS on-premises systems.

Figure 1: NYCBS customer experience solution architecture on Amazon Connect, showing the CTR management microservice, core contact center services, and call recording and AI/ML pipeline layers, integrated with shared AWS services and external systems.

CTR management microservice

This layer handles contact trace record (CTR) processing through Amazon API Gateway as the entry point. The microservice uses AWS Lambda functions (Get Disposition Code and Update CTRs) to retrieve and process call disposition codes, with Amazon DynamoDB storing disposition code data for quick retrieval.

Core contact center services

The central Amazon Connect Customer instance manages incoming agent flows and call routing across more than 100 specialized queues. AWS Secrets Manager securely stores credentials and sensitive configuration. Amazon Polly provides text-to-speech capabilities for automated voice responses. Configuration is managed through DynamoDB configuration tables and configuration Lambda functions, with IVR Integration Lambda functions handling IVR workflows.

Call recording and AI/ML pipeline

Call recordings and artifacts are stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). A dedicated Lambda function handles voicemail processing, with Amazon Transcribe converting voicemails to text. A subsequent Lambda function then creates cases from transcribed voicemails. AI capabilities are powered by Amazon Lex for conversational chatbots and other AWS AI services for intelligent automation, with OMS Lookup providing Order Management System integration.

Shared services and integrations

The architecture integrates with external systems including Microsoft Intune ID for identity management and the on-premises systems of NYCBS. Shared AWS services provide the foundation:

Together, these components helped NYCBS reduce patient enrollment time by 54 percent. The reduction came through automated multi-language routing in English, Spanish, Russian, and Mandarin. NYCBS also added specialty-based queue prioritization for urgent cases and real-time agent monitoring across the more than 250,000 annual patient calls. The implementation maintains HIPAA compliance through role-based access controls, encryption with AWS KMS, and secure credential storage.

Technical highlights

A key engineering decision was moving from a shared multi-tenant environment to a dedicated Amazon Connect Customer instance. This architectural shift helped NYCBS implement several capabilities that had previously been unavailable:

  • Multi-language routing (English, Spanish, Russian, and Mandarin) through language-detection flows.
  • Specialty-based queue prioritization for urgent oncology cases.
  • After-hours coverage logic with automated callback options.
  • HIPAA-compliant call recording with role-based access controls.
  • Real-time agent monitoring and performance dashboards.

Key takeaways

A dedicated Amazon Connect Customer instance gives healthcare organizations the flexibility, security, and native feature access that multi-tenant environments can’t match, including the following:

  • Multi-language, specialty-based routing (English, Spanish, Russian, Mandarin) directly improved patient access to the right care team.
  • Migrating from manual workflows to automated IaC-driven continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) deployment removed third-party management fees and reduced operational costs.
  • HIPAA compliance was maintained throughout using AWS KMS encryption, role-based access controls, and AWS Secrets Manager for credential storage.
  • A 54 percent improvement in patient enrollment shows that modernizing contact center operations delivers measurable clinical and business outcomes.

Results

Within the 13-week implementation window, NYCBS achieved a 54 percent improvement in patient enrollment, which reflects not only operational efficiency, but also improved access to care. The organization removed third-party management fees through direct AWS consumption, reducing operational costs. NYCBS gained real-time visibility into call quality through Operata and the conversational analytics capabilities of Amazon Connect Customer. In addition, the team established a rapid CI/CD pipeline that deploys new features safely and quickly without disrupting patient services.

Conclusion

If your healthcare organization manages complex, high-volume contact center operations, you can apply what NYCBS achieved. A dedicated Amazon Connect Customer instance provides the flexibility, security, and native feature access that healthcare-specific workflows demand. We recommend the following next steps to get started:

Learn more

AWS Partner spotlight

Pronetx, now part of Caylent, an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner, specializes in Amazon Connect. Pronetx helps organizations design, migrate, and operate customer engagement systems on AWS, with a focus on resilience and AI-driven customer experience.

Contact Pronetx | Partner Overview | AWS Marketplace

Top announcements of the What’s Next with AWS, 2026

Post Syndicated from AWS News Blog Team original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/top-announcements-of-the-whats-next-with-aws-2026/

Today at the What’s Next with AWS, Matt Garman, CEO of AWS, Colleen Aubrey, SVP Amazon Applied AI Solutions, Julia White, CMO of AWS, and OpenAI leaders discussed how they and their customers are changing how businesses operate with agents.

Here’s our roundup of the biggest announcements from the event:

Amazon Quick is an AI assistant for work that connects to all of them, learns what matters to you, and takes action on your behalf. Starting today, you can use the new desktop app, sign up for Free and Plus pricing plans, generate visual assets in the chat, and easily connect Quick to even more apps.

  • Quick’s new desktop app (Preview): You can create a personalized experience by staying connected to your local files, calendar, and communications without opening a browser.
  • New Free and Plus pricing plans for Quick: You can sign up within minutes using your personal email address or existing Google, Apple, Github, or Amazon credentials—no AWS account required.
  • Generate visual assets on the fly: Available today, Quick now lets you create polished documents, presentations, infographics, and images directly from the chat interface, no design skills or hours of formatting required.
  • Easily connect Quick to even more apps: Also available today, Quick is expanding its native integrations to include Google Workspace, Zoom, Airtable, Dropbox, and Microsoft Teams.

To learn more, visit the About Amazon News post.

Amazon Connect is expanding from a single product into a set of four agentic AI solutions designed to work within your existing workflows: Amazon Connect Decisions (supply chains), Talent (hiring), Customer (customer experience), and Health (health care).

  • Amazon Connect Decisions is a supply chain planning and intelligence solution that shifts teams from crisis management to proactive planning and decisioning. AI teammates, combining 30 years of Amazon operational science and 25+ specialized supply chain tools, adapt to your business, learn from your team, and continuously improve your operations.
  • Amazon Connect Talent (Preview) is an agentic AI hiring solution built for talent acquisition leaders managing scaled hiring. It delivers AI-led interviews, science-backed assessments, and consistent evaluation, helping recruiters hire high quality candidates faster while providing applicants with a flexible interview experience that reduces human preconceptions.
  • Amazon Connect Customer, previously known as Amazon Connect, delivers intelligent, personalized customer experiences across voice, chat, and digital channels. Amazon Connect Customer now offers new configuration capabilities that enable organizations to set up conversational AI in weeks, not months, and configure experiences without technical expertise.
  • Amazon Connect Health delivers agentic patient verification, appointment management, patient insights, ambient documentation, and medical coding — giving patients faster access to care, clinicians more time for care, and staff capacity for specialized work.

To learn more, visit the About Amazon News post.

AWS and OpenAI extended partnership
AWS and OpenAI are bringing the latest OpenAI models to Amazon Bedrock, launching Codex on Amazon Bedrock, and launching Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents, powered by OpenAI (all in limited preview), giving enterprises the frontier intelligence they want on the infrastructure they trust.

  • OpenAI models on Amazon Bedrock (Limited preview): The latest OpenAI models, including GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.4, will be available in preview on Amazon Bedrock. Use OpenAI’s frontier models through the same Bedrock APIs you already rely on, with unified security, governance, and cost controls. No additional infrastructure to configure, no new security model to learn.
  • Codex on Amazon Bedrock (Limited preview): You can access the OpenAI coding agent within the AWS environments where they already operate at scale. You can authenticate using their AWS credentials, process inference through Amazon Bedrock infrastructure, and apply Codex usage toward their AWS cloud commitments. Codex on Bedrock is available through the Bedrock API, starting with the Codex CLI, the Codex desktop app, and Visual Studio Code extension.
  • Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents, powered by OpenAI (Limited preview): Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents combines frontier AI models with trusted AWS infrastructure, enabling customers to quickly and easily build production-ready OpenAI-powered agents in the cloud. It is built with the OpenAI harness, which is engineered to unlock the full potential of OpenAI frontier models, delivering faster execution, sharper reasoning, and reliable steering of long-running tasks.

To learn more, visit the AWS What’s New post and About Amazon News post.

AWS Weekly Roundup: NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Super on Amazon Bedrock, Nova Forge SDK, Amazon Corretto 26, and more (March 23, 2026)

Post Syndicated from Daniel Abib original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-weekly-roundup-nvidia-nemotron-3-super-on-amazon-bedrock-nova-forge-sdk-amazon-corretto-26-and-more-march-23-2026/

Hello! I’m Daniel Abib, and this is my first AWS Weekly Roundup. I’m a Senior Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS, focused on the generative AI and Amazon Bedrock. With over 28 years of experience in solution architecture, software development, and cloud architecture, I help Startups & Enterprises harness the power of generative AI with Amazon Bedrock. I’ve been at AWS for more than six and a half years, working closely with customers across Latin America, and I’m also passionate about Serverless technologies.

Outside of work and endurance sports, I’m a dedicated father to Cecília (7) and Rafael (4), who keep me busier—and happier— than any distributed system ever could. I’m based in São Paulo, you can find me on LinkedIn and X (@DCABib), where I share insights about generative AI, Amazon Bedrock, AWS serverless services, and the occasional Ironman throwback.

Now, let’s get into this week’s AWS news…

Last week’s launches
Here are some launches and updates from this past week that caught my attention:

  • Amazon Redshift increases performance for new queries in dashboards and ETL workloads by up to 7x — Amazon Redshift now delivers up to 7x faster performance for new queries in dashboards and ETL workloads. Queries you run for the first time — without cached results — now execute significantly faster, reducing wait times for interactive dashboards and accelerating your ETL pipelines. This is particularly impactful for workloads with high query variability where cache hits are less frequent.
  • NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Super now available on Amazon Bedrock — NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Super is now available in Amazon Bedrock, expanding the lineup of foundation models you can access through the unified Bedrock API. Nemotron 3 Super is a high-performance language model optimized for tasks such as text generation, complex reasoning, summarization, and code generation. You can now invoke Nemotron 3 Super alongside other foundation models in your existing Bedrock workflows, without managing any infrastructure.
  • Introducing Nova Forge SDK, a seamless way to customize Nova models for enterprise AI — Nova Forge SDK provides a streamlined way to fine-tune and customize Amazon Nova models for enterprise use cases. You can adapt Nova models to your domain-specific data and deploy them directly within Amazon Bedrock, reducing the complexity of building tailored AI solutions. The SDK handles the heavy lifting of model customization, letting you focus on your business logic rather than the underlying infrastructure.
  • Amazon Corretto 26 is now generally available — Amazon Corretto 26, the latest long-term support (LTS) release of the no-cost, production-ready distribution of OpenJDK, is now generally available. Corretto 26 includes the latest Java language features, performance improvements, and security patches, all backed by long-term support from AWS. You can use it across development and production environments on Amazon Linux, Windows, macOS, and Docker images.
  • AWS Lambda now supports Availability Zone metadata — AWS Lambda now provides Availability Zone metadata for your function invocations. You can now identify which Availability Zone your Lambda function is running in, enabling better observability, more informed architectural decisions, and simplified troubleshooting for latency-sensitive and multi-AZ workloads. This is particularly useful when correlating Lambda execution with other AZ-aware services in your architecture.
  • Amazon CloudWatch Logs now supports log ingestion using HTTP-based protocol — Amazon CloudWatch Logs now supports ingesting logs using an HTTP-based protocol, making it simpler to send logs from applications and services that use standard HTTP endpoints. You can now route logs to CloudWatch Logs without requiring custom agents or additional SDK integrations, lowering the barrier to centralized log management across your workloads.
  • Amazon EKS announces 99.99% Service Level Agreement and new 8XL scaling tier for Provisioned Control Plane clusters — Amazon EKS now offers a 99.99% Service Level Agreement (SLA) for clusters running on Provisioned Control Plane, up from the 99.95% SLA offered on standard control plane. EKS is also introducing the 8XL scaling tier, the largest available Provisioned Control Plane tier, which doubles the Kubernetes API server request processing capacity of the next lower 4XL tier — ideal for large-scale workloads like AI/ML training, high-performance computing (HPC), and large-scale data processing.

Other AWS news
Here are some additional posts and resources that you might find interesting:

  • Kiro for students — Kiro is now available for students, giving the next generation of builders access to AI-powered development tools at no cost. As Swami Sivasubramanian shared on LinkedIn, “Students are the future decision-makers shaping technology” — and Kiro gives them hands-on experience building with AI from day one. If you’re a student or know someone who is, this is a great opportunity to start building with AI-assisted development.
  • Strands Steering Hooks achieved 100% agent accuracy — The Strands Agents team published results showing that Steering Hooks can achieve 100% agent accuracy, outperforming both prompt engineering and rigid workflow approaches for controlling agent behavior. As Swami highlighted on LinkedIn, building reliable AI agents often means rethinking how we guide model behavior — and Steering Hooks offer a compelling new path to agent reliability.
  • Introducing Badges on AWS Builder Center — AWS Builder Center now features badges that recognize your contributions and achievements within the builder community. You can earn badges by sharing solutions, participating in challenges, and engaging with fellow builders. It’s a great way to showcase your expertise and track your growth.
  • Keep Building Together: The Power of Community — A thoughtful read on the power of community-driven learning and collaboration in the AWS ecosystem. Whether you’re just getting started with AWS or you’ve been building for years, the builder community is a place to connect, share knowledge, and grow together. I highly recommend checking it out.

Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendar and sign up for upcoming AWS events:

  • AWS Summits — Join AWS Summits in 2026, free in-person events where you can explore emerging cloud and AI technologies, learn best practices, and network with industry peers and experts. Upcoming Summits include Paris (April 1), London (April 22), Bengaluru (April 23–24), Singapore (May 6), Tel Aviv (May 6), and Stockholm (May 7).
  • AWS Community Days — Community-led conferences where content is planned, sourced, and delivered by community leaders, featuring technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs. Upcoming events include San Francisco (April 10) and Romania (April 23–24).
  • AWSome Women Summit LATAM — Taking place on March 28 in Mexico City, this event celebrates and empowers women in cloud technology across Latin America. A fantastic initiative for the LATAM tech community.

Join the AWS Builder Center to connect with builders, share solutions, and access content that supports your development. Browse the AWS Events and Webinars for upcoming AWS-led in-person and virtual events and developer-focused events.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

This post is part of our Weekly Roundup series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!

AWS Weekly Roundup: Amazon Connect Health, Bedrock AgentCore Policy, GameDay Europe, and more (March 9, 2026)

Post Syndicated from Sébastien Stormacq original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-weekly-roundup-amazon-connect-health-bedrock-agentcore-policy-gameday-europe-and-more-march-9-2026/

Fiti AWS Student Community Kenya!

Last week was an incredible whirlwind: a round of meetups, hands-on workshops, and career discussions across Kenya that culminated with the AWS Student Community Day at Meru University of Science and Technology, with keynotes from my colleagues Veliswa and Tiffany, and sessions on everything from GitOps to cloud-native engineering, and a whole lot of AI agent building.

JAWS Days 2026 is the largest AWS Community Day in the world, with over 1,500 attendees on March 7th. This event started with a keynote speech on building an AI-driven development team by Jeff Barr, and included over 100 technical and community experience sessions, lightning talks, and workshops such as Game Days, Builders Card Challenges, and networking parties.

Now, let’s get into this week’s AWS news…

Last week’s launches
Here are some launches and updates from this past week that caught my attention:

  • Introducing Amazon Connect Health, Agentic AI Built for Healthcare — Amazon Connect Health is now generally available with five purpose-built AI agents for healthcare: patient verification, appointment management, patient insights, ambient documentation, and medical coding. All features are HIPAA-eligible and deployable within existing clinical workflows in days.
  • Policy in Amazon Bedrock AgentCore is now generally available — You can now use centralized, fine-grained controls for agent-tool interactions that operate outside your agent code. Security and compliance teams can define tool access and input validation rules using natural language that automatically converts to Cedar, the AWS open-source policy language.
  • Introducing OpenClaw on Amazon Lightsail to run your autonomous private AI agents — You can deploy a private AI assistant on your own cloud infrastructure with built-in security controls, sandboxed agent sessions, one-click HTTPS, and device pairing authentication. Amazon Bedrock serves as the default model provider, and you can connect to Slack, Telegram, WhatsApp, and Discord.
  • AWS announces pricing for VPC Encryption Controls — Starting March 1, 2026, VPC Encryption Controls transitions from free preview to a paid feature. You can audit and enforce encryption-in-transit of all traffic flows within and across VPCs in a region, with monitor mode to detect unencrypted traffic and enforce mode to prevent it.
  • Database Savings Plans now supports Amazon OpenSearch Service and Amazon Neptune Analytics — You can save up to 35% on eligible serverless and provisioned instance usage with a one-year commitment. Savings Plans automatically apply regardless of engine, instance family, size, or AWS Region.
  • AWS Elastic Beanstalk now offers AI-powered environment analysis — When your environment health is degraded, Elastic Beanstalk can now collect recent events, instance health, and logs and send them to Amazon Bedrock for analysis, providing step-by-step troubleshooting recommendations tailored to your environment’s current state.
  • AWS simplifies IAM role creation and setup in service workflows — You can now create and configure IAM roles directly within service workflows through a new in-console panel, without switching to the IAM console. The feature supports Amazon EC2, Lambda, EKS, ECS, Glue, CloudFormation, and more.
  • Accelerate Lambda durable functions development with new Kiro power — You can now build resilient, long-running multi-step applications and AI workflows faster with AI agent-assisted development in Kiro. The power dynamically loads guidance on replay models, step and wait operations, concurrent execution patterns, error handling, and deployment best practices.
  • Amazon GameLift Servers launches DDoS Protection — You can now protect session-based multiplayer games against DDoS attacks with a co-located relay network that authenticates client traffic using access tokens and enforces per-player traffic limits, at no additional cost to GameLift Servers customers.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New with AWS page.

From AWS community
Here are my personal favorite posts from AWS community and my colleagues:

  • I Built a Portable AI Memory Layer with MCP, AWS Bedrock, and a Chrome Extension — Learn how to build a persistent memory layer for AI agents using MCP and Amazon Bedrock, packaged as a Chrome extension that carries context across sessions and applications.
  • When the Model Is the Machine — Mike Chambers built an experimental app where an AI agent generates a complete, interactive web application at runtime from a single prompt — no codebase, no framework, no persistent state. A thought-provoking exploration of what happens when the model becomes the runtime.

Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendar and sign up for upcoming AWS events:

  • AWS Community GameDay Europe — Think you know AWS? Prove it at the AWS Community GameDay Europe on March 17, a gamified learning event where teams compete to solve real-world technical challenges using AWS services.
  • AWS at NVIDIA GTC 2026 — Join us at our AWS sessions, booths, demos, and ancillary events in NVIDIA GTC 2026 on March 16 – 19, 2026 in San Jose. You can receive 20% off event passes through AWS and request a 1:1 meeting at GTC.
  • AWS Summits — Join AWS Summits in 2026: free in-person events where you can explore emerging cloud and AI technologies, learn best practices, and network with industry peers and experts. Upcoming Summits include Paris (April 1), London (April 22), and Bengaluru (April 23–24).
  • AWS Community Days — Community-led conferences where content is planned, sourced, and delivered by community leaders. Upcoming events include Slovakia (March 11), Pune (March 21), and the AWSome Women Summit LATAM in Mexico City (March 28)

Browse here for upcoming AWS led in-person and virtual events, startup events, and developer-focused events.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

— seb

Set up custom domains in Amazon Connect hosted with M365 Exchange Online or Google Workspace

Post Syndicated from Zip Zieper original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/set-up-custom-domains-in-amazon-connect-hosted-with-m365-exchange-online-or-google-workspace/

Amazon Connect Email provides built-in capabilities that make it straightforward to prioritize, assign, and automate the resolution of customer service emails, improving customer satisfaction and agent productivity. With Amazon Connect Email, you can receive and respond to emails sent by customers to business addresses or submitted through web forms on your website or mobile app. You can configure auto-responses, prioritize emails, create or update cases, and route emails to the best available agent when agent assistance is required. Additionally, these capabilities work seamlessly with Amazon Connect outbound campaigns, helping you deliver proactive and personalized email communications.

Amazon Connect Email integrates with Amazon Simple Email Service to send, receive, and monitor emails for content marked as spam or containing viruses, delivery success rates, and sender reputation results.

This post guides you through setting up email in Amazon Connect by routing emails from your email server (Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace) to Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) SMTP endpoints using a custom email domain onboarded to Amazon SES. By configuring Amazon Connect with your custom email domain in Amazon SES, you can create a unified communication hub that enhances customer experience while simplifying agent workflows. The result is a more responsive, efficient contact center that meets customers where they are, whether they prefer speaking, chatting, or sending emails.

Use case overview

AnyCompany has invested heavily in its email infrastructure over the years, developing a robust and centralized email server that manages both internal and external email traffic. This unified system has become an integral part of their operations, streamlining communication across departments and with customers. AnyCompany has also established a public support email address that has gained significant recognition and trust among their customer base. This email address, featured prominently in all their product documentation, marketing materials, and customer communications, has become a cornerstone of their brand identity in customer support.

Now, AnyCompany faces the challenge of enhancing their customer support process by implementing an automated acknowledgment system for incoming support emails. However, they want to maintain their existing email setup due to its deep integration with internal workflows and the substantial investment it represents. Additionally, preserving their well-known support email address is crucial to protect the brand equity they’ve built over years of customer interactions.

By integrating Amazon Connect with their current email server, AnyCompany can create a seamless solution that addresses these complex requirements. With this integration, customers can continue sending emails to the familiar public support address (for example, [email protected]), maintaining consistency in their customer experience. When new emails are received, Amazon Connect can trigger automated acknowledgment messages, providing immediate assurance to customers that their inquiries have been received and are being processed.

This approach offers multiple benefits. It improves customer satisfaction by providing prompt responses and reduces the volume of follow-up emails. It also preserves AnyCompany’s significant investment in their existing email infrastructure, so they can continue using the centralized system for both internal and external communications. Perhaps most importantly, it maintains the brand recognition associated with their long-standing support email address, so customers can continue to use the contact point they’ve grown to trust over the years.

Solution overview

This post provides a contact center email solution with the following benefits:

  • Customers continue to send emails to your custom domain
  • Emails are routed through your primary email server to Amazon Connect (via Amazon SES)
  • Agents receive and respond to emails within the Amazon Connect agent workspace
  • Customers receive agent responses from your custom domain (via Amazon SES)

This solution involves three main steps:

  1. Configure Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace to route emails to Amazon Connect
  2. Verify your custom domain in Amazon SES to enable sending emails
  3. Onboard your email address in Amazon Connect to handle customer communications

Prerequisites

Before you begin, make sure you have the following prerequisites:

  • Administrative access to modify your custom email domain’s DNS settings.
    • Note – modifying MX records can impact email receiving for your primary domain (example.com). It is highly recommended to create a subdomain (for example, testing.example.com) for testing to avoid impacting any email receiving on your primary domain or use the provided email domain that comes with the Amazon Connect instance (for example, @<instance-alias>.email.connect.aws).
  • Administrative access to modify your Microsoft 365 Exchange Online or Google Workspace Gmail configuration.
  • AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) access to Amazon SES and Amazon Connect on your AWS Management Console.
  • An existing user in Amazon Connect with access to managing email flows, channels, and routing. For example, CallCenterManager can be used to perform actions related to user management, metrics, and routing. Or you can create a user with a custom scoped-down security profile.
  • When setting up Amazon Simple Email Service for use with Amazon Connect your SES account will be in the sandbox mode, which works well for testing. You will need to request Amazon SES production access before you can fully utilize Amazon SES with Amazon Connect.

Configure Amazon SES

Part of creating a domain identity is configuring its DKIM-based verification. DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) is an email authentication method that Amazon SES uses to verify domain ownership, and receiving mail servers use to validate email authenticity. To learn more, refer to Creating a domain identity.

Complete the following steps to configure your domain identity in Amazon SES:

  1. Open your AWS console and choose the AWS Region where your Amazon Connect instance is deployed.
  2. On the Amazon SES console, choose Identities under Configuration in the navigation pane.
  3. Choose Create identity and provide the following information:
    1. Choose Domain as the identity type.
    2. Enter your custom email domain name.
    3. Enable Use a custom MAIL FROM domain.
    4. Set MAIL FROM domain to feedback.
    5. Set Behavior on MX failure to Use default MAIL FROM domain.
  4. For DKIM verification, provide the following information (unless instructed otherwise):
    1. Choose Easy DKIM under Advanced DKIM settings.
    2. Choose RSA_2048_BIT for DKIM signing key length.
    3. Enable Publish DNS records to Route53 if applicable.
    4. Enable DKIM signatures.
  5. Choose Create identity.

Amazon SES will generate DNS records needed to verify the domain, including:

  • DKIM CNAME records
  • Custom MAIL FROM domain MX and TXT records
  • DMARC TXT records

If the domain is hosted in Route 53, Amazon SES provides an option to automatically Publish DNS records to Route53. When your domain is hosted with Route 53, SES domain verification typically completes within a few minutes. You will see the status Verification pending, followed by Verified.

If the domain is not hosted in Route53, Amazon SES will present individual copy buttons per record as well as a CSV file download option. These records must be added to your DNS so Amazon SES can verify the domain.

After your externally managed DNS has been updated, return to the Amazon SES console and confirm that the identity status has changed to Verified. The time to complete this step is highly variable. You can choose to configure DKIM by using either Easy DKIM or Bring Your Own DKIM (BYODKIM), and depending on your choice, you will have to configure the signing key length of the private key. For detailed steps, refer to Creating a domain identity.

When you first setup Amazon SES, your account is placed in the SES sandbox which we use to prevent unauthorized or unintended sending. While in sandbox mode, you can only send mail to email addresses and domains you verify. After you receive Amazon SES production access for your custom domain, you can send and receive email to and from a valid email address without verification. For more information about the Amazon SES sandbox, refer to Request production access (Moving out of the Amazon SES sandbox).

For setup and testing purposes, complete the following steps to configure an email identity in Amazon SES:

  1. On the Amazon SES console, choose Identities under Configuration in the navigation pane.
  2. Choose Create identity and choose Email Address.
  3. Enter your work email address (you will need access to the inbox to verify ownership). This is the email address that Amazon Connect and Amazon SES will use to send and receive email while your SES account is in the sandbox.
  4. Click Create identity.
  5. Check your email inbox and click the link to verify this is an email address you control.

Configure Amazon Connect

Complete the following steps to configure Amazon Connect:

  1. On the Amazon Connect console, open your instance by clicking on Instance alias.
  2. Under Channels and communications, choose Email.
  3. Choose Add domain.
  4. Choose the domain you verified in Amazon SES.
  5. In your instance, choose Email addresses under Channels.
  6. Choose Create email address and provide the following information:
    1. Create an email address with the same name and domain as the inbound address your customers will use ([email protected]).
    2. Provide a friendly sender name that will appear in customer inboxes.
    3. Create a new flow or attach an existing flow to the custom domain email address (this flow will route inbound emails).
    4. Choose Save.
  7. Configure Outbound email configuration in your outbound queue:
    1. For Default email address, provide the email address you created earlier.
    2. For Outbound email flow, provide the email flow for outbound emails (this flow will route outbound emails).
    3. Choose Save.

Configure Microsoft 365 Exchange or Google Workspace

In this section, we provide step-by-step guidance to configure your primary email service with a rule (Microsoft) or route (Google) that sends inbound email addressed to a specific address(s) to Amazon Connect.

Option A: Microsoft 365 Exchange configuration

Complete the following steps to configure Microsoft 365 Exchange:

  1. Find the email receiving endpoint for your Region. For example, inbound-smtp.us-west-2.amazonaws.com.
  2. Create a connector in Exchange:
    1. Navigate to the Exchange admin center.
    2. Under Mail flow, choose Connectors.
    3. Choose Add a connector.
    4. Set Connection from to Office 365
    5. Set Connection to to Your organization’s email server.
    6. Choose Next.
    7. Name the connector to identify the Region.
    8. Choose Next.
    9. For Use of connector, select Only when I have a transport rule set up that redirects messages to this connector.
    10. For Routing, enter the SES email receiving endpoint.
    11. Choose the plus sign, then choose Next.
    12. For Security restrictions, select Always use Transport Layer Security (TLS) to secure the connection.
    13. Follow your internal process for this step. In this example, we select Any digital certificate, including self-signed certificates.
    14. Choose Next.
    15. For Validation email, enter a valid email address currently used in your Amazon Connect instance.
    16. Choose the plus sign, then choose Next.
      This will send a test email address to that email address. No action needs to be taken with the test email. You should see the email validated and receive the validation test email in the agent workspace.
    17. Review your connector configuration and choose Create connector.

Validate that the connector status is set to On, then proceed to the next steps.

  1. Create a mail flow rule to send your inbound email to Amazon Connect:
    1. Under Mail flow, choose Rules.
    2. Choose Add a rule¸ then choose Create a new rule.
    3. Name the rule.
    4. Set conditions to apply if the recipient is this person and choose the email address for Amazon Connect.
    5. Set the action to Redirect the message to and the following connector and choose your new connector.
    6. Choose Next.
    7. Set Rule mode to Enforce.
    8. Activate the rule immediately by specifying the current time.
    9. Set Match sender address in message to Header or envelope.
    10. Choose Next.
    11. Review your rule configuration and choose Finish.

After you confirm your rule is enabled, you can test your configuration.

Option B: Google Workspace Gmail configuration

Complete the following steps to configure with Google Workspace:

  1. Log into your Google Workspace admin account.
  2. Navigate to Gmail.
  3. Choose Hosts and choose Add Route.
  4. Configure the mail route:
    1. Provide a name indicating the Region.
    2. Enter the SES email receiving endpoint and port 25.
    3. Enable security options:
      1. Select Require mail to be transmitted via a secure (TLS) connection.
      2. Select Require CA signed certificate.
      3. Select Validate certificate hostname.
    4. Choose Test TLS connection.
    5. If the connection is successful, choose SAVE.
  5. Configure default routing:
    1. Navigate to Default routing and choose Configure.
    2. Enter the email address that should route to Amazon Connect.
    3. Change the route to the mail route you created.
    4. Select Perform this action on non-recognized and recognized addresses.
    5. Save and confirm the route is enabled.

Test your configuration

After you have completed the appropriate steps above, test both inbound (to Amazon Connect) and outbound (from Amazon Connect) message-flows.

Test inbound (to Amazon Connect)

Test your inbound configuration:

  1. Open your email application.
  2. Send a test email to the email address you configured to be sent to Amazon Connect.
  3. In the Amazon Connect agent workspace, accept the incoming email.
  4. Confirm the email received in your agent workspace matches the email address you configured to be sent to Amazon Connect.

Test outbound (to external recipient from Amazon Connect)

Test your outbound configuration:

  1. Log in to your Amazon Connect instance.
  2. Choose New email.
  3. Enter To address (use your work email address), Subject & Body.
    1. Alternatively, To address (use your work email address) and choose a Template.
  4. Click Send.
  5. Check your work email inbox for the message. Verify the email’s From address is the email address you configured to be sent from Amazon Connect.

Request Amazon SES production access

Once you have successfully tested email receiving and sending within Amazon Connect, request Amazon SES production access (see Moving out of the Amazon SES sandbox) in the Amazon SES Developer Guide. Importantly, you will not be able to send email from your domain via Amazon Connect until your account is removed from the SES sandbox.

Conclusion

In this post, we showed how to configure Amazon Connect to handle emails using your custom domain through Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. This setup provides a seamless email experience for your customers while giving your agents the powerful tools available in the Amazon Connect agent workspace.

To get started with Amazon Connect Email, refer to the Amazon Connect Administrator Guide. For hands-on learners, the Amazon Connect Email Enablement Workshop provides guidance and exercises to configure Amazon Connect Email, set up email queues and routing rules, and discusses best practices for delivering exceptional email-based customer service.

Additional resources

For additional guidance and information, refer to the following resources:

About the authors

AWS Weekly Roundup: Amazon DocumentDB, AWS Lambda, Amazon EC2, and more (August 4, 2025)

Post Syndicated from Danilo Poccia original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-weekly-roundup-amazon-documentdb-aws-lambda-amazon-ec2-and-more-august-4-2025/

This week brings an array of innovations spanning from generative AI capabilities to enhancements of foundational services. Whether you’re building AI-powered applications, managing databases, or optimizing your cloud infrastructure, these updates help build more advanced, robust, and flexible applications.

Last week’s launches
Here are the launches that got my attention this week:

Additional updates
Here are some additional projects, blog posts, and news items that I found interesting:

Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendars so that you can sign up for these upcoming events:

AWS re:Invent 2025 (December 1-5, 2025, Las Vegas) — AWS’s flagship annual conference offering collaborative innovation through peer-to-peer learning, expert-led discussions, and invaluable networking opportunities.

AWS Summits — Join free online and in-person events that bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. Register in your nearest city: Mexico City (August 6) and Jakarta (August 7).

AWS Community Days — Join community-led conferences that feature technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs led by expert AWS users and industry leaders from around the world: Australia (August 15), Adria (September 5), Baltic (September 10), and Aotearoa (September 18).

Join the AWS Builder Center to learn, build, and connect with builders in the AWS community. Browse here upcoming in-person and virtual developer-focused events.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

– Danilo

AWS Weekly Roundup: EC2 C8gn instances, Amazon Nova Canvas virtual try-on, and more (July 7, 2025)

Post Syndicated from Elizabeth Fuentes original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-weekly-roundup-amazon-bedrock-api-keys-amazon-nova-canvas-virtual-try-on-and-more-july-7-2025/

Every Monday we tell you about the best releases and blogs that caught our attention last week.

Before continuing with this AWS Weekly Roundup, I’d like to share that last month I moved with my family to San Francisco, California, to start a new role as Developer Advocate/SDE, GenAI.

This excites me because I’ll have the opportunity to connect with new communities in the Bay Area while tackling exciting new challenges. If you’re part of a community focused on building generative AI and agentics applications, or know of one, I’d love to connect. Let’s connect!

Last week’s launches
Here are the launches from last week:

  • New Amazon EC2 C8gn instances powered by AWS Graviton4 offering up to 600Gbps network bandwidth – Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) C8gn instances are now generally available, powered by AWS Graviton4 processors and 6th generation AWS Nitro Cards. These network-optimized instances deliver up to 600 Gbps network bandwidth. This represents the highest bandwidth among EC2 network-optimized instances, with up to 192 vCPUs and 384 GiB memory. They provide 30% higher compute performance than C7gn instances and are ideal for network-intensive workloads like virtual appliances, data analytics, and cluster computing jobs.
  • Build the highest resilience apps with multi-Region strong consistency in Amazon DynamoDB global tables – Amazon DynamoDB global tables now supports multi-Region strong consistency (MRSC) for applications requiring zero Recovery Point Objective (RPO). This capability ensures applications can read the latest data from any Region during outages, addressing critical needs in payment processing and financial services. MRSC requires three AWS Regions configured as either three full replicas or two replicas plus a witness, providing the highest level of application resilience for mission-critical workloads.
  • Amazon Nova Canvas update: Virtual try-on and style options now available – Amazon Nova Canvas introduces virtual try-on capabilities that help you visualize how clothing looks on a person by combining two images, plus eight new pre-trained style options (3D animation, design sketch, vector illustration, graphic novel, etc.) for generating images with improved artistic consistency. Available in three AWS Regions, these features enhance AI-powered image generation capabilities for retailers and content creators seeking realistic product visualizations.
  • Amazon Q in Connect now supports 7 languages for proactive recommendations – Amazon Q in Connect, a generative AI-powered assistant for customer service, now provides proactive recommendations in seven languages: English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean. The AI-powered customer service assistant detects customer intent during voice and chat interactions to help agents resolve issues quickly and accurately.
  • Amazon Aurora MySQL and Amazon RDS for MySQL integration with Amazon SageMaker is now available – This integration provides near real-time data availability for analytics. It automatically extracts MySQL data into lakehouses with Apache Iceberg compatibility. You can then access this data seamlessly through various analytics engines and machine learning tools.
  • Amazon Aurora DSQL is now available in additional AWS Regions – Amazon Aurora DSQL expands to Asia Pacific (Seoul) and now supports multi-Region clusters across Asia Pacific and European regions. This serverless, distributed SQL database offers unlimited scalability, highest availability, and zero infrastructure management with AWS Free Tier access.

Other AWS blog posts

  • Optimize RAG in production environments using Amazon SageMaker JumpStart and Amazon OpenSearch Service – Learn how to optimize Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) in production environments using Amazon SageMaker JumpStart and Amazon OpenSearch Service. This comprehensive guide demonstrates implementing RAG workflows with LangChain, covers OpenSearch optimization strategies, provides setup instructions, and explains benefits of combining these AWS services for scalable, cost-effective generative AI applications.v
  • Agentic GenAI App Using Bedrock, MCP servers on EKS – This post shows how to build a scalable AI chat application using Amazon Bedrock, Strands Agent, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers deployed on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). The architecture combines agentic workflows with containerized microservices for intelligent, auto-scaling conversations with multiple foundation models.
  • Enforce table level access control on data lake tables using AWS Glue 5.0 with AWS Lake Formation – AWS Glue 5.0 introduces Full-Table Access (FTA) control for Apache Spark with AWS Lake Formation, providing table-level security without fine-grained access overhead. This feature supports native Spark SQL/DataFrames for Lake Formation tables. It enables read/write operations on Iceberg and Hive tables with improved performance and lower costs.

Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendars and sign up for these upcoming AWS events:

  • AWS re:Invent – Register now to get a head start on choosing your best learning path, booking travel and accommodations, and bringing your team to learn, connect, and have fun. Early-career professionals can apply for the All Builders Welcome Grant program, designed to remove financial barriers and create diverse pathways into cloud technology. Applications are now open and close on July 15, 2025.
  • AWS NY Summit – You can gain insights from Swami’s keynote featuring the latest cutting-edge AWS technologies in compute, storage, and generative AI. My News Blog team is also preparing some exciting news for you. If you’re unable to attend in person, you can still participate by registering for the global live stream. Also, save the date for these upcoming Summits in July and August near your city.
  • AWS Builders Online Series – If you’re based in one of the Asia Pacific time zones, join and learn fundamental AWS concepts, architectural best practices, and hands-on demonstrations to help you build, migrate, and deploy your workloads on AWS.
  • Join AWS Gen AI Lofts – Experience AWS Gen AI Lofts across San Francisco, Berlin, Dubai, Dublin, Bengaluru, Manchester, Paris, Tel Aviv, and additional locations – hands-on workshops, expert guidance, investor networking, and collaborative spaces designed to accelerate your generative AI startup journey.

You can browse all upcoming in-person and virtual events.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

— Eli

Training a call center fraud detection model for IVR calls with Amazon SageMaker Canvas

Post Syndicated from Pablo Forero original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/training-a-call-center-fraud-detection-model-for-ivr-calls-with-amazon-sagemaker-canvas/

Fraud detection is a critical challenge for call centers, they need to provide a seamless customer experience while protecting the organization from fraudulent activities. Traditionally, call centers have relied on agents to manually screen calls, which can be time-consuming and expensive. Alternatively, companies might force customers to authenticate themselves every time they call, leading to a poor user experience. Machine learning (ML) offers a powerful solution that can help organization reach a harmonious balance between these approaches, enabling efficient and accurate fraud detection without compromising the customer experience.

This blog post will show you how to use the power of ML to build a fraud-detection model using Amazon SageMaker Canvas, a no-code/low-code ML service that business analysts and domain experts can use to build, train, and deploy ML models without requiring extensive ML expertise.

Background

In this solution, you will use a contact trace record (CTR) dataset from Amazon Connect. The solution works with data from other inbound telephony services provided they contain call specific metadata. Importantly, each call has been previously labeled based on past fraud detection efforts by the call center.

To start, you will enrich the raw CTR data using the phone number validation service from Amazon Pinpoint. Then, you will prepare the data using Amazon SageMaker notebooks and train a fraud detection model using SageMaker Canvas. Finally, to understand how to provide a scalable and cost-effective solution, you will explore how to deploy the model to a Sagemaker endpoint and right-size through autoscaling in a managed, serverless environment.

The following figure shows the architecture with the complete process including data enrichment, merging, cleanup, and model training and deployment. Throughout this blogpost we will reference the key parts as we implement them.

Architecture diagram

Data enrichment and preparation

Each CTR contains information about an incoming call such as agent, connection attempts, and channel. Before proceeding, you must transform the data into a tabular form (CSV, Parquet, or tables), which are the supported formats in SageMaker Canvas.

The raw CTR dataset doesn’t contain enough information to effectively train an ML model. You will enrich it using the Amazon Pinpoint validate API, which provides additional fields such as carrier, location data, and phone type. After you have the enriched dataset, you can use a SageMaker notebook to clean and prepare the data for training.

Enriching the data with Amazon Pinpoint validate API
Amazon Pinpoint includes a phone number validation service that you can use to determine if a phone number is valid and to obtain additional contact information. For example, the API response for a valid mobile phone number would look like the following:

{
    "NumberValidateResponse": {
        "Carrier": "ExampleCorp Mobile",
        "City": "Seattle",
        "CleansedPhoneNumberE164": "+12065550142",
        "CleansedPhoneNumberNational": "2065550142",
        "Country": "United States",
        "CountryCodeIso2": "US",
        "CountryCodeNumeric": "1",
        "OriginalPhoneNumber": "+12065550142",
        "PhoneType": "MOBILE",
        "PhoneTypeCode": 0,
        "Timezone": "America/Los_Angeles",
        "ZipCode": "98101"
    }
}

While the response for an invalid phone number would contain the following:

{
    "NumberValidateResponse": {
        "CleansedPhoneNumberE164": "+44163296076",
        "CleansedPhoneNumberNational": "163296076",
        "Country": "United Kingdom",
        "CountryCodeIso2": "GB",
        "CountryCodeNumeric": "44",
        "OriginalPhoneNumber": "+440163296076",
        "PhoneType": "INVALID",
        "PhoneTypeCode": 3
    }
}

There are multiple ways to enrich your dataset with this API. The response from the validate API call is a JSON document that contains all the fields. You will need to convert them to the appropriate format and merge them with the original CTR dataset. This will give you an enriched dataset that includes all the fields from the CTR and their corresponding validate results. The goal is to extract the caller phone number from each row in the dataset (CustomerEndpoint in Connect) and run it against the Amazon Pinpoint validate API.

The following figure shows an example architecture used to enrich with Amazon Pinpoint, cache in Amazon DynamoDB, and merge the datasets with Lambda functions. The DynamoDB cache saves the responses from Pinpoint by input key so that you don’t have to re-validate phone numbers.

Portion of the architecture focusing on the validation process

Data engineering and data preparation

The first step is to clean up the data by discarding fields that aren’t adding any predictive value. This will make the training process faster and the model more accurate. For example, in the CTR data, the AWSAccountId field will be the same for all records, and the ContactId field will be unique, so you can discard them both. The goal is to simplify the dataset as much as possible using SageMaker Canvas to perform multiple experiments to better understand which fields in the data have the biggest impact on the prediction.

After you have reduced the dataset, you can select a random, smaller subset of data (for example, 1,000 records) and build a model in SageMaker Canvas. SageMaker Canvas provides a visual interface that you can use to rapidly build, train, and deploy ML models without the need for extensive coding.

To begin the training process, you will first import the prepared, enriched data file containing the CTR data into SageMaker Canvas. SageMaker Canvas will automatically detect the data format and structure, allowing you to preview the dataset and make any necessary adjustments before proceeding.

After the dataset is ready, you can select the fraud label as your target variable and configure the model training parameters. SageMaker Canvas will handle the underlying ML algorithms and hyperparameter tuning, streamlining the model development process.

After the model is trained, SageMaker Canvas will show an analysis of the fields and their weights. In addition to the build step—where you can drop and transform your imported dataset—SageMaker Canvas also includes Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler, which you can use to prepare, featurize, and analyze your data. This allows you to do additional transformations as you experiment and iterate. You should continue to run these small experiments while making changes to the training dataset with the goal of getting the best performance from your model, while reducing the training time and the latency in inference.

After experimenting, you will identify the most important features and how you want to transform your data. When you’re confident in your model’s performance, you can decide how to deploy the trained model.

Final model deployment and right-sizing

Once your model is trained, you will need to deploy an endpoint so that you can invoke your model and consume the results via API. For example, the diagram below shows a Lambda Function calling the deployed endpoint. We continue to use the DynamoDB table as a cache. This way we avoid reprocessing numbers.

Portion of the architecture focusing on SageMaker model invocation

SageMaker Canvas offers a default deployment option where you can choose the instance type and number of instances to host the trained model that will meet your scaling needs. To help ensure that these instances aren’t over- or under-provisioned, SageMaker provides multiple features to help you optimize your deployment to your specific needs.

  • Autoscaling: Autoscaling dynamically adjusts the number of instances provisioned for a model in response to workload changes. The steps to make this change are described in detail in Configure model autoscaling. SageMaker recently introduced Scale Down to Zero for AI inference, which allows endpoints to scale to zero instances during periods of inactivity and can help customers save costs.
  • Inference recommender: Amazon SageMaker Inference Recommender reduces the time required to get ML models into production by automating load testing and model tuning across SageMaker ML instances.
  • Serverless deployment: Amazon SageMaker Serverless Inference is a purpose-built inference option that you can use to deploy and scale ML models without configuring or managing any of the underlying infrastructure. Compute resources scale automatically depending on traffic, eliminating the need to choose instance types or manage scaling policies. To learn more, see Serverless endpoint operations.

To have use a serverless deployment and obtain inference recommendations, a single-container model is needed. This is currently not possible when using SageMaker Data Wrangler, because it generates two containers following data transformation: one for data preprocessing and one for model prediction.

After preparing the final dataset, you can bring it into SageMaker Canvas to train the detection model. Follow the same steps as you did with the smaller tests, making sure that you don’t use any of the data transformation options within SageMaker Canvas.

Depending on the size and complexity of the final dataset, the training process can take several hours to complete. After the training is complete, SageMaker Canvas will generate a trained model that you can immediately deploy to an endpoint.

Conclusion

By using the power of Amazon SageMaker Canvas, you can build, train, and deploy a robust fraud detection model, empowering your call center to deliver exceptional customer experiences while safeguarding your business and allowing your human agents to focus on legitimate customers.

You can begin testing SageMaker Canvas using the AWS Management Console today or learn more about SageMaker Canvas basics at the SageMaker Canvas Immersion Day workshop.

About the authors

AWS Weekly roundup: EventBridge, SNS FIFO, Amazon Corretto, Amazon Connect, Amazon Bedrock, and more

Post Syndicated from Sébastien Stormacq original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-weekly-roundup-eventbridge-sns-fifo-amazon-corretto-amazon-connect-amazon-bedrock-and-more/

I counted about 40 new launches from AWS since last week – back to our normal rhythm of releases. Services teams are listening to your feedback and developing little (or big) changes that makes your life easier when working with our services. The ability to support multiple sessions in the AWS Console is my favorite one so far in 2025.

But our teams didn’t stop there, let’s look at the last week’s new announcements.

Last week’s launches

Beside the usual Regional expansion (new capabilities that are now available in a new Region), here are the launches that got my attention.

Amazon EventBridge announces direct delivery to cross-account targets – Amazon EventBridge is now able to deliver events to targets in another AWS account directly without having to send them to the default bus in the target account first. This will simplify so many architectures out there! It supports any target that supports resource-based policies, including AWS Lambda, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), Amazon Kinesis, and Amazon API Gateway.

Amazon Corretto quaterly update – We announced quarterly security and critical updates for Amazon Corretto Long-Term Supported (LTS) and Feature Release (FR) versions of OpenJDK. Corretto 23.0.2, 21.0.6, 17.0.14, 11.0.26, 8u442 are now available for download. Amazon Corretto is a no-cost, multi-platform, production-ready distribution of OpenJDK. You can download the updates from the Corretto home page or just type apt-get or yum update.

High-throughput mode for Amazon SNS FIFO Topics – Amazon SNS now supports high-throughput mode for SNS FIFO topics, with default throughput matching SNS standard topics across all Regions. When you enable high-throughput mode, SNS FIFO topics will maintain order within message group, while reducing the deduplication scope to the message-group level. With this change, you can leverage up to 30K messages per second (MPS) per account by default in US East (N. Virginia) Region, and 9K MPS per account in US West (Oregon) and Europe (Ireland) Regions, and request quota increases for additional throughput in any Region.

Amazon Connect agent workspace now supports audio optimization for Citrix and Amazon WorkSpaces virtual desktops – Amazon Connect agent workspace now supports the ability to redirect audio from Citrix and Amazon WorkSpaces Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environments to a customer service agent’s local device. Audio redirection improves voice quality and reduces latency for voice calls handled on virtual desktops, providing a better experience for both end customers and agents.

Amazon Redshift announces support for History Mode for zero-ETL integrations – This new capability enables you to build Type 2 Slowly Changing Dimension (SCD 2) tables on your historical data from databases, out-of-the-box in Amazon Redshift, without writing any code. History mode simplifies the process of tracking and analyzing historical data changes, allowing you to gain valuable insights from your data’s evolution over time.

Finally, Amazon Bedrock has its own set of announcements. First, for anyone investing in retrieval-augmented generation, Bedrock now support multimodal content with Cohere Embed 3 Multilingual and Embed 3 English models. This enables you to create embeddings to not only index text, but also images.

Second, read Luma AI’s Ray2 visual AI model now available in Amazon Bedrock. Luma Ray2 is a large-scale video-generation model capable of creating realistic visuals with fluid, natural movement. With Luma Ray2 in Amazon Bedrock, you can generate production-ready video clips with seamless animations, ultrarealistic details, and logical event sequences with natural language prompts, removing the need for technical prompt engineering. Ray2 currently supports 5- and 9-second video generations with 540p and 720p resolution.

And finally, Amazon Bedrock Flows announces preview of multi-turn conversation support. Amazon Bedrock Flows enables you to link foundation models (FMs), Amazon Bedrock Prompts, Amazon Bedrock Agents, Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases, Amazon Bedrock Guardrails and other AWS services together to build and scale pre-defined generative AI workflows. This week, the team announced preview of multi-turn conversation support for agent nodes in Flows. This capability enables dynamic, back-and-forth conversations between users and flows, similar to a natural dialogue.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New at AWS page.

Other AWS events
Check your calendar and sign up for upcoming AWS events.

AWS Summits season is starting! I’m already working with the local team to prepare content for the Summits in Paris and London. Summits are free online and in-person events that bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. Stay updated by visiting the official AWS Summit website and sign up for notifications to learn when registration opens for events in your area.

AWS GenAI Lofts are collaborative spaces and immersive experiences that showcase AWS expertise in cloud computing and AI. They provide startups and developers with hands-on access to AI products and services, exclusive sessions with industry leaders, and valuable networking opportunities with investors and peers. Find a GenAI Loft location near you, and don’t forget to register.

Browse all upcoming AWS led in-person and virtual events here.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

— seb

This post is part of our Weekly Roundup series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!

AWS Weekly Roundup: New Asia Pacific Region, DynamoDB updates, Amazon Q developer, and more (January 13, 2025)

Post Syndicated from Betty Zheng (郑予彬) original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-weekly-roundup-new-asia-pacific-region-dynamodb-updates-amazon-q-developer-and-more-january-13-2025/

As we move into the second week of 2025, China is celebrating Laba Festival (腊八节), a traditional holiday, which marks the beginning of Chinese New Year preparations. On this day, Chinese people prepare Laba congee, a special porridge combining various grains, dried fruits, and nuts. This

nutritious mixture symbolizes harmony, prosperity, and good fortune — with each ingredient representing the diversity and abundance of life. This traditional practice dates back to when Buddha achieved enlightenment after consuming rice porridge, making it a symbol of both material and spiritual nourishment. The festival, occurring on the eighth day of the twelfth lunar month, marks the countdown to Spring Festival, China’s most significant traditional holiday celebrating family reunion and renewal.

As our global tech community grows, such cultural celebrations remind us of the importance of inclusive innovation and shared progress.

Last week’s launches

Let’s take a look at what Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched in this week.

New AWS Asia Pacific (Thailand) Region– AWS has expanded its global infrastructure with the launch of the new Asia Pacific (Thailand) AWS Region, featuring three Availability Zones. With this addition, customers in Thailand and throughout Southeast Asia can serve customers with reduced latency while maintaining data residency within Thailand. The newly launched Region supports the complete range of AWS services and strengthens our presence in the rapidly growing ASEAN market.

New AWS Direct Connect location in Bangkok – Following the launch of our Thailand Region, we’ve established a new AWS Direct Connect location in Bangkok and expanded our existing infrastructure. This addition provides customers in Thailand with improved connectivity options and reduced network latency when accessing AWS services.

Database and analytics

Configurable point-in-time recovery periods for Amazon DynamoDB – Amazon DynamoDB now enables customizable point-in-time recovery (PITR) periods, which means customers can specify recovery durations ranging from 1 to 35 days on a per-table basis. This enhancement enables organizations to meet precise compliance requirements while maximizing cost-efficiency. The feature is now available across all AWS Regions, including AWS GovCloud (US West) and China Regions. This flexibility in data recovery periods empowers customers to align their backup policies precisely with their business requirements and regulatory obligations.

Amazon MSK Connect APIs with AWS PrivateLink – Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka Connect (Amazon MSK Connect) APIs now support AWS PrivateLink, giving customers access to MSK Connect APIs through private endpoints within their virtual private cloud (VPC). This enhancement provides increased security and reduced data exposure by keeping traffic within the AWS network.

Generative AI and machine learning

Amazon Q Developer in SageMaker Code Editor– Amazon Q Developer is now integrated into the Amazon SageMaker Code Editor integrated development environment (IDE), enhancing the developer’s experience with AI-powered code assistance. Intelligent code suggestions, documentation assistance, and contextual recommendations are now directly available within the SageMaker development environment.

Management and governance

AWS Systems Manager Automation in AWS Chatbot – AWS Chatbot now offers 20 additional AWS Systems Manager Automation runbook recommendations, expanding its capabilities for automated operations management. These new recommendations help customers streamline their operational tasks and implement best practices more efficiently through chat-based interactions.

AWS Transit Gateway cost analysis enhancement – We’ve introduced new capabilities for analyzing Transit Gateway data processing charges using cost allocation tags. This feature provides improved visibility and control over networking costs, enabling organizations to track and optimize AWS Transit Gateway usage efficiently. The enhanced cost analysis tools deliver detailed insights into network traffic patterns and associated costs.

Other AWS news and highlights

2024’s most popular DevOps blog posts – The retrospective blog post “The most visited DevOps and Developer Productivity blog posts in 2024” has reached the top one position on this week’s AWS most popular articles chart. This compilation presents the most influential DevOps content from 2024, offering insights into trending topics and best practices. The collection examines key developments in continuous integration and continuous development (CI/CD), infrastructure as code (IaC), and automation practices.

New security course for generative AI – AWS Skill Builder has released a new course focusing on securing generative AI applications on AWS. This comprehensive training teaches professionals to implement security best practices for artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) workloads, addressing data protection, model security, and compliance requirements. The course meets the growing demand for specialized security knowledge in the rapidly evolving field of generative AI.

Amazon Connect Contact Lens free trials – We’re introducing free trials for first-time users of Amazon Connect Contact Lens conversational analytics and performance evaluations. New customers can process up to 100,000 voice minutes monthly at no cost for 2 months, and first-time performance evaluation users receive a 30-day free trial starting with their first evaluation. With this initiative, customers can experience Contact Lens capabilities in their environment without additional costs. The free trials are available across all AWS Regions where Contact Lens is supported.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New with AWS page.

Whether you’re a developer, architect, business leader, or you’re starting your cloud journey – and regardless of what 2024 brought your way – 2025 presents new opportunities for everyone.

This post is part of our Weekly Roundup series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!

– Betty

Newly enhanced Amazon Connect adds generative AI, WhatsApp Business, and secure data collection

Post Syndicated from Elizabeth Fuentes original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/newly-enhanced-amazon-connect-adds-generative-ai-whatsapp-business-and-secure-data-collection/

Today, Amazon Connect introduces a set of new features that help businesses enhance their contact center operations through generative AI, advanced security features, and streamlined bot management. These innovations help businesses deliver better customer experiences by creating more time and space for meaningful human interactions, while maintaining security and compliance.

Contact center managers continually face challenges in optimizing self-service resolution rates, evaluating agent performance efficiently, and maintaining data privacy compliance. Additionally, creating and managing conversational AI experiences often requires specialized expertise and complex integrations across multiple services.

To address these challenges, Amazon Connect introduced key features such as generative AI–powered customer segmentation for targeted campaigns, native WhatsApp Business messaging for omnichannel support, secure collection of sensitive customer data in chat interactions, simplified conversational AI bot management in the Amazon Connect interface, and new enhancements to Amazon Q in Connect. Amazon Connect also added new analytics capabilities through Amazon Connect Contact Lens to help optimize bot performance and contact center operations.

Here are the new capabilities that will help you create more personalized and efficient customer experiences while maintaining the highest standards of data security and operational excellence.

Generative AI powered features
Amazon Connect integrates new generative AI capabilities to automate and enhance customer interactions, enabling smarter targeting and more efficient contact center management.

Generative AI segmentation and trigger-based campaigns – Uses generative AI–powered assistance to create customer segments using conversational prompts. This allows businesses to create precise customer segments using natural language descriptions, making it easier to identify and reach specific customer groups. Trigger campaigns enable organizations to communicate with their customers based on specific customer events, such as cart abandonment.

You can also start with ready-to-use suggestions.

Simplify conversational AI bot creation and enhance them with Amazon Q in Connect – Create, edit, and manage conversational AI bots powered by Amazon Lex directly within the Amazon Connect web interface. You can now enhance these bots with Amazon Q in Connect, a generative AI–powered assistant for customer service. Amazon Q in Connect now supports end-customer self-service interactions across interactive voice response (IVR) and digital channels, in addition to assisting contact center agents with recommended responses and actions.

This integration extends beyond traditional voice and chatbot Amazon Lex capabilities by providing advanced conversational abilities via large language models (LLMs). The system intelligently searches configured knowledge bases, customer information, web content, and third-party application data to respond to customer questions when they don’t match predefined intents. Administrators can set custom guardrails for their instance, defining restrictions on response generation and monitoring Amazon Q in Connect performance.

Generative AI–powered automated evaluations: Supervisors can automatically evaluate up to 100 percent of contacts using generative AI.

Generative AI–powered contact categorization: Improves existing semantic match functionality using natural language intents.

Improved interfaces and tools
Enhanced capabilities for bot management and monitoring, simplifying the creation and optimization of automated experiences.

Amazon Connect for WhatsApp Business messaging – Natively integrate with WhatsApp Business messaging so customers can receive support over WhatsApp in addition to existing Amazon Connect channels such as voice, SMS, chat, and Apple Messages for Business. This addition to Amazon Connect omnichannel capabilities helps businesses meet customers on their preferred communication channel while maintaining consistent service delivery and management within the Amazon Connect application.

Contact Lens conversational AI bot dashboards – Offers analytics to monitor the performance of your conversational AI bots built in Amazon Connect.

Self-service voice (IVR) recording and interaction logs on contact details – Provides comprehensive records of self-service interactions, including audio recordings.

Improved intraday forecasts – Allows comparison of intraday forecasts against previously published forecasts.

Salesforce Contact Center with Amazon Connect (Preview) – Natively integrates the digital channels and unified routing of Amazon Connect into Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) system. This new offering allows companies to use a single routing and workflow system for both Amazon Connect and Salesforce channels, intelligently directing calls, chats, and cases to the appropriate self-service or agent interaction. If you’re interested, sign up to join the preview.

Enhanced security for chat
New features that enhance security and compliance in chat interactions, enabling secure handling of sensitive information.

Collection of sensitive customer data within chats – Amazon Connect chat and messaging now includes a data privacy option that enables secure handling of sensitive customer information during chat interactions. This feature protects personally identifiable information (PII) and payment card industry (PCI) data, promoting compliance with data protection regulations.

Key benefits
The latest features of Amazon Connect combine generative AI, enhanced security, and streamlined bot management to help businesses:

Transform customer experience – Amazon Connect elevates customer interactions through AI–powered segmentation, enabling personalized engagement strategies. The new WhatsApp Business messaging expands omnichannel support capabilities, meeting customers on their preferred channel. Additionally, advanced bot capabilities, including Amazon Q in Connect, enhance self-service resolution rates, delivering more efficient customer experiences.

Enhance security and operations – Contact centers can now strengthen their security posture with PCI-compliant chat interactions while maintaining operational efficiency. Custom AI guardrails promote appropriate response generation, while the simplified bot management interface eliminates the need for specialized expertise. Analytics and forecasting capabilities provide comprehensive performance monitoring, enabling data-driven decision-making for optimal contact center operations.

Pricing and availability – These features are available today in all AWS Regions where Amazon Connect is supported. For pricing, visit the Amazon Connect Pricing. For implementation guidance, visit the Amazon Connect documentation.

— Eli

Channel deflection from voice to chat using Amazon Connect

Post Syndicated from Siva Thangavel original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/channel-deflection-from-voice-to-chat-using-amazon-connect/

This post was co-written with Sagar Bedmutha, senior solutions architect at Tata Consultancy Services, and Rajiya Patan, AWS developer at Tata Consultancy Services

Service excellence helps cultivate customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. According to Gartner, one service excellence challenge is long wait times on interactive voice response (IVR) systems. Long wait times can translate into frustrated customers and potentially lost business. To maintain and grow business, companies must examine the shape of their customer service—avoiding long wait times, offering alternative communication channels such as chat, and designing easier-to-use, more efficient systems.

Amazon Connect, an AWS cloud-based contact center solution, is specialized in both voice and chat communication. This powerful tool can open up new avenues for businesses to enhance their customer service experience. Through Amazon Connect, companies can implement strategies like transferring a voice call to a chat channel. This can help resolve the pain point of wait times while maintaining the continuity of the engagement with customers.

This post outlines an Amazon Connect architecture pattern for transitioning between voice and chat channels. With this solution, a customer in a long queue on a voice call can choose a callback or to continue the conversation with an agent through chat.

Prerequisites

To implement this solution, you’ll need the following:

Solution overview

Our solution provides an alternate channel and call-back option if there is a long wait time in IVR. Customers can transition from voice to a chat or email instantly without additional work.

We designed this solution by using the following AWS services and custom widget:

  •  Amazon Connect – Omnichannel cloud contact center that helps you provide superior customer service at a lower cost. Amazon Connect contact flows define the customer experience from start to finish.
  •  Lambda – Serverless, event-driven compute service that lets you run code for virtually any type of application or backend service, without you needing to provision or manage servers.
  •  CloudFront – Content delivery network (CDN) that speeds up delivery of static and dynamic web content, such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and images. CloudFront caches content at edge locations closer to end users.
  •  Amazon Pinpoint – Flexible, scalable marketing communications service that connects you with customers over email, SMS, push notifications, or voice.
  •  Customized chat widget – Hosted in an Amazon S3 bucket, the widget provides the interface for chat interactions. It is developed using HTML, Vanilla JavaScript, and customized styling.

The following high-level architecture diagram outlines the flow of the process.

Architecture diagram showing the flow from the customer call to chatting with a live agent. Detailed description follows in text.

Channel deflection architecture diagram

  1. The customer initiates a call to the IVR system for customer support.
  2. If there is a long wait time, the IVR system provides an option for callback through the voice channel or the ability to switch to another channel like chat or SMS.
  3. The customer selects option to transition the call to a chat channel.
  4. The Amazon Connect flow invokes a Lambda function to create a chat session for the customer. The Lambda function generates a secure, time-limited signed URL for the chat channel, including relevant context.
  5. The solution sends the URL to the customer’s registered mobile number and email address through Amazon Pinpoint.
  6. The customer receives the chat link on their mobile device or email, then they select the link.
  7. A chat session initiates in a web browser, and a live agent is connected to assist the customer.

Note: The chat link becomes inactive if the user doesn’t access it within the designated schedule.

Implementation considerations

When implementing this voice-to-chat transition solution, it’s important to consider the following:

  • Ensure that your AWS account has the necessary permissions, and that you’ve set up appropriate IAM roles and policies for secure access to Amazon Connect, Lambda, Amazon S3, CloudFront, and Amazon Pinpoint.
  • Ensure that you have the necessary technical knowledge. Familiarity with Amazon Connect contact flows is crucial, as is proficiency in developing and deploying Lambda functions. You must create custom Lambda functions to handle the chat session creation and generate secure, time-limited signed URLs.
  • Set up an S3 bucket to host your custom chat widget, and configure a CloudFront distribution for performance and security.
  • Integrate Amazon Pinpoint for communication delivery. This requires careful setup to handle email and SMS notifications effectively.
  • When developing the custom chat widget, focus on creating a user-friendly interface that integrates with the Amazon Connect chat API. Pay special attention to security measures, particularly in generating and managing the signed URLs for chat access.
  • Complete testing to confirm smooth operations across various scenarios, including edge cases like expired chat links.
  • Remember to monitor the solution’s performance in production and consider scalability as your customer base grows.

By addressing these implementation considerations, you’ll be well-positioned to deploy a robust and effective voice-to-chat transition system that enhances your customer service capabilities.

Extended use cases

You can extend this solution for solving other contact center use cases with minimal or no modification. The following are some examples:

  • Assisting customers with complex technical issues that require a step by step guide.
  • Helping customers to follow instructions by reading the manual to complete backend processes, like profile updates.
  • Overcoming language barriers with international customer support by using writing instead of voice.
  • Authenticating customers using address, zip code, or other demographics.
  • Offering chat functionality to customers who prefer to multitask during interactions.
  • Deflecting traffic to alternate channels to improve customer experience and reduce costs.
  • Offering a method for secure document exchange, such as during financial services consultations.

Conclusion

Using Amazon Connect and other AWS services, this solution offers an implementation that can transition voice calls to a chat channel. This approach provides flexibility to your customer so that they can switch between channels. This helps to improve the total customer experience, the company’s efficiency, and the agent’s productivity. The flow provides continuity in conversations, so that agents can resume conversations with clients across channels and still maintain context. In the end, this solution empowers companies to deliver exceptional customer service and drive positive outcomes for their business. You can learn more about using Amazon Connect by visiting our Amazon Connect Resources page.

AWS Weekly Roundup: Amazon EC2 U7i Instances, Bedrock Converse API, AWS World IPv6 Day and more (June 3, 2024)

Post Syndicated from Channy Yun original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-weekly-roundup-amazon-ec2-u7i-instances-bedrock-converse-api-aws-world-ipv6-day-and-more-june-3-2024/

Life is not always happy, there are difficult times. However, we can share our joys and sufferings with those we work with. The AWS Community is no exception.

Jeff Barr introduced two members of the AWS community who are dealing with health issues. Farouq Mousa is an AWS Community Builder and fighting brain cancer. Allen Helton is an AWS Serverless Hero and his young daughter is fighting leukemia.

Please donate to support Farauq and Olivia, Allen’s daughter to overcome their disease.

Last week’s launches
Here are some launches that got my attention:

Amazon EC2 high memory U7i Instances – These instances with up to 32 TiB of DDR5 memory and 896 vCPUs are powered by custom fourth generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (Sapphire Rapids). These high memory instances are designed to support large, in-memory databases including SAP HANA, Oracle, and SQL Server. To learn more, visit Jeff’s blog post.

New Amazon Connect analytics data lake – You can use a single source for contact center data including contact records, agent performance, Contact Lens insights, and more — eliminating the need to build and maintain complex data pipelines. Your organization can create your own custom reports using Amazon Connect data or combine data queried from third-party sources. To learn more, visit Donnie’s blog post.

Amazon Bedrock Converse API – This API provides developers a consistent way to invoke Amazon Bedrock models removing the complexity to adjust for model-specific differences such as inference parameters. With this API, you can write a code once and use it seamlessly with different models in Amazon Bedrock. To learn more, visit Dennis’s blog post to get started.

New Document widget for PartyRock – You can build, use, and share generative AI-powered apps for fun and for boosting personal productivity, using PartyRock. Its widgets display content, accept input, connect with other widgets, and generate outputs like text, images, and chats using foundation models. You can now use new document widget to integrate text content from files and documents directly into a PartyRock app.

30 days of alarm history in Amazon CloudWatch – You can view the history of your alarm state changes for up to 30 days prior. Previously, CloudWatch provided 2 weeks of alarm history. This extended history makes it easier to observe past behavior and review incidents over a longer period of time. To learn more, visit the CloudWatch alarms documentation section.

10x faster startup time in Amazon SageMaker Canvas – You can launch SageMaker Canvas in less than a minute and get started with your visual, no-code interface for machine learning 10x faster than before. Now, all new user profiles created in existing or new SageMaker domains can experience this accelerated startup time.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New at AWS page.

Other AWS news
Here are some additional news items and a Twitch show that you might find interesting:

Let us manage your relational database! – Jeff Barr ran a poll to better understand why some AWS customers still choose to host their own databases in the cloud. Working backwards, he highlights four issues that AWS managed database services address. Consider these before hosting your own database.

Amazon Bedrock Serverless Prompt Chaining – This repository provides examples of using AWS Step Functions and Amazon Bedrock to build complex, serverless, and highly scalable generative AI applications with prompt chaining.

AWS Merch Store Spring Sale – Do you want to buy AWS branded t-shirts, hats, bags, and so on? Get 15% off on all items now through June 7th.

Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendars and sign up for these AWS events:

AWS World IPv6 Day — Join us a free in-person celebration event on June 6, for technical presentations from AWS experts plus a workshop and whiteboarding session. You will learn how to get started with IPv6 and hear from customers who have started on the journey of IPv6 adoption. Check out your near city: San Francisco, Seattle, New York,  London, Mumbai, Bangkok, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Beijing, Manila, and Sydney.

AWS Summits — Join free online and in-person events that bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. Register in your nearest city: Stockholm (June 4), Madrid (June 5), and Washington, DC (June 26–27).

AWS re:Inforce — Join us for AWS re:Inforce (June 10–12) in Philadelphia, PA. AWS re:Inforce is a learning conference focused on AWS security solutions, cloud security, compliance, and identity. Connect with the AWS teams that build the security tools and meet AWS customers to learn about their security journeys.

AWS Community Days — Join community-led conferences that feature technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs led by expert AWS users and industry leaders from around the world: Midwest | Columbus (June 13), Sri Lanka (June 27), Cameroon (July 13), New Zealand (August 15), Nigeria (August 24), and New York (August 28).

You can browse all upcoming in-person and virtual events.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

— Channy

This post is part of our Weekly Roundup series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!

Simplify custom contact center insights with Amazon Connect analytics data lake

Post Syndicated from Donnie Prakoso original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/simplify-custom-contact-center-insights-with-amazon-connect-analytics-data-lake/

Analytics are vital to the success of a contact center. Having insights into each touchpoint of the customer experience allows you to accurately measure performance and adapt to shifting business demands. While you can find common metrics in the Amazon Connect console, sometimes you need to have more details and custom requirements for reporting based on the unique needs of your business. 

Starting today, the Amazon Connect analytics data lake is generally available. As announced last year as preview, this new capability helps you to eliminate the need to build and maintain complex data pipelines. Amazon Connect data lake is zero-ETL capable, so no extract, transform, or load (ETL) is needed.

Here’s a quick look at the Amazon Connect analytics data lake:

Improving your customer experience with Amazon Connect
Amazon Connect analytics data lake helps you to unify disparate data sources, including customer contact records and agent activity, into a single location. By having your data in a centralized location, you now have access to analyze contact center performance and gain insights while reducing the costs associated with implementing complex data pipelines.

With Amazon Connect analytics data lake, you can access and analyze contact center data, such as contact trace records and Amazon Connect Contact Lens data. This provides you the flexibility to prepare and analyze data with Amazon Athena and use the business intelligence (BI) tools of your choice, such as, Amazon QuickSight and Tableau. 

Get started with the Amazon Connect analytics data lake
To get started with the Amazon Connect analytics data lake, you’ll first need to have an Amazon Connect instance setup. You can follow the steps in the Create an Amazon Connect instance page to create a new Amazon Connect instance. Because I’ve already created my Amazon Connect instance, I will go straight to showing you how you can get started with Amazon Connect analytics data lake.

First, I navigate to the Amazon Connect console and select my instance.

Then, on the next page, I can set up my analytics data lake by navigating to Analytics tools and selecting Add data share.

This brings up a pop-up dialog, and I first need to define the target AWS account ID. With this option, I can set up a centralized account to receive all data from Amazon Connect instances running in multiple accounts. Then, under Data types, I can select the types I need to share with the target AWS account. To learn more about the data types that you can share in the Amazon Connect analytics data lake, please visit Associate tables for Analytics data lake.

Once it’s done, I can see the list of all the target AWS account IDs with which I have shared all the data types.

Besides using the AWS Management Console, I can also use the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) to associate my tables with the analytics data lake. The following is a sample command:

$> aws connect batch-associate-analytics-data-set --cli-input-json file:///input_batch_association.json

Where input_batch_association.json is a JSON file that contains association details. Here’s a sample:

{
	"InstanceId": YOUR_INSTANCE_ID,
	"DataSetIds": [
		"<DATA_SET_ID>"
		],
	"TargetAccountId": YOUR_ACCOUNT_ID
}

Next, I need to approve (or reject) the request in the AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM) console in the target account. RAM is a service to help you securely share resources across AWS accounts. I navigate to AWS RAM and select Resource shares in the Shared with me section.

Then, I select the resource and select Accept resource share. 

At this stage, I can access shared resources from Amazon Connect. Now, I can start creating linked tables from shared tables in AWS Lake Formation. In the Lake Formation console, I navigate to the Tables page and select Create table.

I need to create a Resource link to a shared table. Then, I fill in the details and select the available Database and the Shared table’s region.

Then, when I select Shared table, it will list all the available shared tables that I can access.

Once I select the shared table, it will automatically populate Shared table’s database and Shared table’s owner ID. Once I’m happy with the configuration, I select Create.

To run some queries for the data, I go to the Amazon Athena console.The following is an example of a query that I ran:

With this configuration, I have access to certain Amazon Connect data types. I can even visualize the data by integrating with Amazon QuickSight. The following screenshot show some visuals in the Amazon QuickSight dashboard with data from Amazon Connect.

Customer voice
During the preview period, we heard lots of feedback from our customers about Amazon Connect analytics data lake. Here’s what our customer say:

Joulica is an analytics platform supporting insights for software like Amazon Connect and Salesforce. Tony McCormack, founder and CEO of Joulica, said, “Our core business is providing real-time and historical contact center analytics to Amazon Connect customers of all sizes. In the past, we frequently had to set up complex data pipelines, and so we are excited about using Amazon Connect analytics data lake to simplify the process of delivering actionable intelligence to our shared customers.”

Things you need to know

  • Pricing — Amazon Connect analytics data lake is available for you to use up to 2 years of data without any additional charges in Amazon Connect. You only need to pay for any services you use to interact with the data.
  • Availability — Amazon Connect analytics data lake is generally available in the following AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Africa (Cape Town), Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo), Canada (Central), and Europe (Frankfurt, London)
  • Learn more — For more information, please visit Analytics data lake documentation page.

Happy building,
— Donnie

New generative AI features in Amazon Connect, including Amazon Q, facilitate improved contact center service

Post Syndicated from Veliswa Boya original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-generative-ai-features-in-amazon-connect-including-amazon-q-facilitate-improved-contact-center-service/

If you manage a contact center, then you know the critical role that agents play in helping your organization build customer trust and loyalty. Those of us who’ve reached out to a contact center know how important agents are with guiding through complex decisions and providing fast and accurate solutions where needed. This can take time, and if not done correctly, then it may lead to frustration.

Generative AI capabilities in Amazon Connect
Today, we’re announcing that the existing artificial intelligence (AI) features of Amazon Connect now have generative AI capabilities that are powered by large language models (LLMs) available through Amazon Bedrock to transform how contact centers provide service to customers. LLMs are pre-trained on vast amounts of data, commonly known as foundation models (FMs), and they can understand and learn, generate text, engage in interactive conversations, answer questions, summarize dialogs and documents, and provide recommendations.

Amazon Q in Connect: recommended responses and actions for faster customer support
Organizations are in a state of constant change. To maintain a high level of performance that keeps up with these organizational changes, contact centers continuously onboard, train, and coach agents. Even with training and coaching, agents must often search through different sources of information, such as product guides and organization policies, to provide exceptional service to customers. This can increase customer wait times, lowering customer satisfaction and increasing contact center costs.

Amazon Q in Connect, a generative AI-powered agent assistant that includes functionality formerly available as Amazon Connect Wisdom, understands customer intents and uses relevant sources of information to deliver accurate responses and actions for the agent to communicate and resolve unique customer needs, all in real-time. Try Amazon Q in Connect for no charge until March 1, 2024. The feature is easy to enable, and you can get started in the Amazon Connect console.

Amazon Connect Contact Lens: generative post-contact summarization for increased productivity
To improve customer interactions and make sure details are available for future reference, contact center managers rely on the notes that agents manually create after every customer interaction. These notes include details on how a customer issue was addressed, key moments of the conversation, and any pending follow-up items.

Amazon Connect Contact Lens now provides generative AI-powered post-contact summarization, and enables contact center managers to more efficiently monitor and help improve contact quality and agent performance. For example, you can use summaries to track commitments made to customers and make sure of the prompt completion of follow-up actions. Moments after a customer interaction, Contact Lens now condenses the conversation into a concise and coherent summary.

Amazon Lex in Amazon Connect: assisted slot resolution
Using Amazon Lex, you can already build chatbots, virtual agents, and interactive voice response (IVR) which lets your customers schedule an appointment without speaking to a human agent. For example, “I need to change my travel reservation for myself and my two children,” might be difficult for a traditional bot to resolve to a numeric value (how many people are on the travel reservation?).

With the new assisted slot resolution feature, Amazon Lex can now resolve slot values in user utterances with great accuracy (for example, providing an answer to the previous question by providing a correct numeric value of three). This is powered by the advanced reasoning capabilities of LLMs which improve accuracy and provide a better customer experience. Learn about all the features of Amazon Lex, including the new generative AI-powered capabilities to help you build better self-service experiences.

Amazon Connect Customer Profiles: quicker creation of unified customer profiles for personalized customer experiences
Customers expect personalized customer service experiences. To provide this, contact centers need a comprehensive understanding of customers’ preferences, purchases, and interactions. To achieve that, contact center administrators create unified customer profiles by merging customer data from a number of applications. These applications each have different types of customer data stored in varied formats across a range of data stores. Stitching together data from these various data stores needs contact center administrators to understand their data and figure out how to organize and combine it into a unified format. To accomplish this, they spend weeks compiling unified customer profiles.

Starting today, Amazon Connect Customer Profiles uses LLMs to shorten the time needed to create unified customer profiles. When contact center administrators add data sources such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Adobe Analytics, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Zendesk, Customer Profiles analyze the data to understand what the data format and content represents and how the data relates to customers’ profiles. Then, Customer Profiles then automatically determines how to organize and combine data from different sources into complete, accurate profiles. With just a few steps, managers can review, make any necessary edits, and complete the setup of customer profiles.

Review summary mapping

In-app, web, and video capabilities in Amazon Connect
As an organization, you want to provide great, easy-to-use, and convenient customer service. Earlier in this post I talked about self-service chatbots and how they help you with this. At times customers want to move beyond the chatbot, and beyond an audio conversation with the agent.

Amazon Connect now has in-app, web, and video capabilities to help you deliver rich, personalized customer experiences (see Amazon Lex features for details). Using the fully-managed communication widget, and with a few lines of code, you can implement these capabilities on your web and mobile applications. This allows your customers to get support from a web or mobile application without ever having to leave the page. Video can be enabled by either the agent only, by the customer only, or by both agent and customer.

Video calling

Amazon Connect SMS: two-way SMS capabilities
Almost everyone owns a mobile device and we love the flexibility of receiving text-based support on-the-go. Contact center leaders know this, and in the past have relied on disconnected, third-party solutions to provide two-way SMS to customers.

Amazon Connect now has two-way SMS capabilities to enable contact center leaders to provide this flexibility (see Amazon Lex features for details). This improves customer satisfaction and increases agent productivity without costly integration with third-party solutions. SMS chat can be enabled using the same configuration, Amazon Connect agent workspace, and analytics as calls and chats.

Learn more

Send feedback

– Veliswa

AWS Weekly Roundup – EC2 DL2q instances, PartyRock, Amplify’s 6th birthday, and more – November 20, 2023

Post Syndicated from Channy Yun original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-weekly-roundup-ec2-dl2q-instances-partyrock-amplifys-6th-birthday-and-more-november-20-2023/

Last week I saw an astonishing 160+ new service launches. There were so many updates that we decided to publish a weekly roundup again. This continues the same innovative pace of the previous week as we are getting closer to AWS re:Invent 2023.

Our News Blog team is also finalizing new blog posts for re:Invent to introduce awesome launches with service teams for your reading pleasure. Jeff Barr shared The Road to AWS re:Invent 2023 to explain our blogging journey and process. Please stay tuned in the next week!

Last week’s launches
Here are some of the launches that caught my attention last week:

Amazon EC2 DL2q instances – New DL2q instances are powered by Qualcomm AI 100 Standard accelerators and are the first to feature Qualcomm’s AI technology in the public cloud. With eight Qualcomm AI 100 Standard accelerators and 128 GiB of total accelerator memory, you can run popular generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications and extend to edge devices across smartphones, autonomous driving, personal compute, and extended reality headsets to develop and validate these AI workloads before deploying.

PartyRock for Amazon Bedrock – We introduced PartyRock, a fun and intuitive hands-on, generative AI app-building playground powered by Amazon Bedrock. You can experiment, learn all about prompt engineering, build mini-apps, and share them with your friends—all without writing any code or creating an AWS account.

You also can now access the Meta Llama 2 Chat 13B foundation model and Cohere Command Light, Embed English, and multilingual models for Amazon Bedrock.

AWS Amplify celebrates its sixth birthday – We announced six new launches; a new documentation site, support for Next.js 14 with our hosting and JavaScript library, added custom token providers and an automatic React Native social sign-in update to Amplify Auth, new ChangePassword and DeleteUser account settings components, and updated all Amplify UI packages to use new Amplify JavaScript v6. You can also use wildcard subdomains when using a custom domain with your Amplify application deployed to AWS Amplify Hosting.

Amplify docs site UI

Also check out other News Blog posts about major launches published in the past week:

Other AWS service launches
Here are some other bundled feature launches per AWS service:

Amazon Athena  – You can use a new cost-based optimizer (CBO) to enhance query performance based on table and column statistics, collected by AWS Glue Data Catalog and Athena JDBC 3.x driver, a new alternative that supports almost all authentication plugins. You can also use Amazon EMR Studio to develop and run interactive queries on Amazon Athena.

Amazon CloudWatch – You can use a new CloudWatch metric called EBS Stalled I/O Check to monitor the health of your Amazon EBS volumes, the regular expression for Amazon CloudWatch Logs Live Tail filter pattern syntax to search and match relevant log events, observability of SAP Sybase ASE database in CloudWatch Application Insights, and up to two stats commands in a Log Insights query to perform aggregations on the results.

Amazon CodeCatalyst – You can connect to a Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) from CodeCatalyst Workflows, provision infrastructure using Terraform within CodeCatalyst Workflows, access CodeCatalyst with your workforce identities configured in IAM Identity Center, and create teams made up of members of the CodeCatalyst space.

Amazon Connect – You can use a pre-built queue performance dashboard and Contact Lens conversational analytics dashboard to view and compare real-time and historical aggregated queue performance. You can use quick responses for chats, previously written formats such as typing in ‘/#greet’ to insert a personalized response, and scanning attachments to detect malware or other unwanted content.

AWS Glue – AWS Glue for Apache Spark added new six database connectors: Teradata, SAP HANA, Azure SQL, Azure Cosmos DB, Vertica, and MongoDB, as well as the native connectivity to Amazon OpenSearch Service.

AWS Lambda – You can see single pane view of metrics, logs, and traces in the AWS Lambda console and advanced logging controls to natively capture logs in JSON structured format. You can view the SAM template on the Lambda console and export the function’s configuration to AWS Application Composer. AWS Lambda also supports Java 21 and NodeJS 20 versions built on the new Amazon Linux 2023 runtime.

AWS Local Zones in Dallas – You can enable the new Local Zone in Dallas, Texas, us-east-1-dfw-2a, with Amazon EC2 C6i, M6i, R6i, C6gn, and M6g instances and Amazon EBS volume types gp2, gp3, io1, sc1, and st1. You can also access Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, Application Load Balancer, and AWS Direct Connect in this new Local Zone to support a broad set of workloads at the edge.

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) – You can standardize access control to Kafka resources using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and build Kafka clients for Amazon MSK Serverless written in all programming languages. These are open source client helper libraries and code samples for popular languages, including Java, Python, Go, and JavaScript. Also, Amazon MSK now supports an enhanced version of Apache Kafka 3.6.0 that offers generally available Tiered Storage and automatically sends you storage capacity alerts when you are at risk of exhausting your storage.

Amazon OpenSearch Service Ingestion – You can migrate your data from Elasticsearch version 7.x clusters to the latest versions of Amazon OpenSearch Service and use persistent buffering to protect the durability of incoming data.

Amazon RDS –Amazon RDS for MySQL now supports creating active-active clusters using the Group Replication plugin, upgrading MySQL 5.7 snapshots to MySQL 8.0, and Innovation Release version of MySQL 8.1.

Amazon RDS Custom for SQL Server extends point-in-time recovery support for up to 1,000 databases, supports Service Master Key Retention to use transparent data encryption (TDE), table- and column-level encryption, DBMail and linked servers, and use SQL Server Developer edition with the bring your own media (BYOM).

Additionally, Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployments with two readable standbys now supports minor version upgrades and system maintenance updates with typically less than one second of downtime when using Amazon RDS Proxy.

AWS Partner Central – You can use an improved user experience in AWS Partner Central to build and promote your offerings and the new Investments tab in the Partner Analytics Dashboard to gain actionable insights. You can now link accounts and associated users between Partner Central and AWS Marketplace and use an enhanced co-sell experience with APN Customer Engagements (ACE) manager.

Amazon QuickSight – You can programmatically manage user access and custom permissions support for roles to restrict QuickSight functionality to the QuickSight account for IAM Identity Center and Active Directory using APIs. You can also use shared restricted folders, a Contributor role and support for data source asset types in folders and the Custom Week Start feature, an addition designed to enhance the data analysis experience for customers across diverse industries and social contexts.

AWS Trusted Advisor – You can use new APIs to programmatically access Trusted Advisor best practices checks, recommendations, and prioritized recommendations and 37 new Amazon RDS checks that provide best practices guidance by analyzing DB instance configuration, usage, and performance data.

There’s a lot more launch news that I haven’t covered. See AWS What’s New for more details.

See you virtually in AWS re:Invent
AWS re:Invent 2023Next week we’ll hear the latest from AWS, learn from experts, and connect with the global cloud community in Las Vegas. If you come, check out the agenda, session catalog, and attendee guides before your departure.

If you’re not able to attend re:Invent in person this year, we’re offering the option to livestream our Keynotes and Innovation Talks. With the registration for online pass, you will have access to on-demand keynote, Innovation Talks, and selected breakout sessions after the event.

– Channy

AWS Weekly Roundup – Amazon MWAA, EMR Studio, Generative AI, and More – August 14, 2023

Post Syndicated from Antje Barth original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-weekly-roundup-amazon-mwaa-emr-studio-generative-ai-and-more-august-14-2023/

While I enjoyed a few days off in California to get a dose of vitamin sea, a lot has happened in the AWS universe. Let’s take a look together!

Last Week’s Launches
Here are some launches that got my attention:

Amazon MWAA now supports Apache Airflow version 2.6 – Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (Amazon MWAA) is a managed orchestration service for Apache Airflow that you can use to set up and operate end-to-end data pipelines in the cloud. Apache Airflow version 2.6 introduces important security updates and bug fixes that enhance the security and reliability of your workflows. If you’re currently running Apache Airflow version 2.x, you can now seamlessly upgrade to version 2.6.3. Check out this AWS Big Data Blog post to learn more.

Amazon EMR Studio adds support for AWS Lake Formation fine-grained access control – Amazon EMR Studio is a web-based integrated development environment (IDE) for fully managed Jupyter notebooks that run on Amazon EMR clusters. When you connect to EMR clusters from EMR Studio workspaces, you can now choose the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role that you want to connect with. Apache Spark interactive notebooks will access only the data and resources permitted by policies attached to this runtime IAM role. When data is accessed from data lakes managed with AWS Lake Formation, you can enforce table and column-level access using policies attached to this runtime role. For more details, have a look at the Amazon EMR documentation.

AWS Security Hub launches 12 new security controls – AWS Security Hub is a cloud security posture management (CSPM) service that performs security best practice checks, aggregates alerts, and enables automated remediation. With the newly released controls, Security Hub now supports three additional AWS services: Amazon Athena, Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility), and Amazon Neptune. Security Hub has also added an additional control against Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). AWS Security Hub now offers 276 controls. You can find more information in the AWS Security Hub documentation.

Additional AWS services available in the AWS Israel (Tel Aviv) Region – The AWS Israel (Tel Aviv) Region opened on August 1, 2023. This past week, AWS Service Catalog, Amazon SageMaker, Amazon EFS, and Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics were added to the list of available services in the Israel (Tel Aviv) Region. Check the AWS Regional Services List for the most up-to-date availability information.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New at AWS page.

Other AWS News
Here are some additional blog posts and news items that you might find interesting:

AWS recognized as a Leader in 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service with Amazon Connect – AWS was named a Leader for the first time since Amazon Connect, our flexible, AI-powered cloud contact center, was launched in 2017. Read the full story here. 

Generate creative advertising using generative AI –  This AWS Machine Learning Blog post shows how to generate captivating and innovative advertisements at scale using generative AI. It discusses the technique of inpainting and how to seamlessly create image backgrounds, visually stunning and engaging content, and reducing unwanted image artifacts.

AWS open-source news and updates – My colleague Ricardo writes this weekly open-source newsletter in which he highlights new open-source projects, tools, and demos from the AWS Community.

Upcoming AWS Events
Check your calendars and sign up for these AWS events:

Build On AWS - Generative AIBuild On Generative AI – Your favorite weekly Twitch show about all things generative AI is back for season 2 today! Every Monday, 9:00 US PT, my colleagues Emily and Darko look at new technical and scientific patterns on AWS, inviting guest speakers to demo their work and show us how they built something new to improve the state of generative AI.

In today’s episode, Emily and Darko discussed the latest models LlaMa-2 and Falcon, and explored them in retrieval-augmented generation design patterns. You can watch the video here. Check out show notes and the full list of episodes on community.aws.

AWS NLP Conference 2023 – Join this in-person event on September 13–14 in London to hear about the latest trends, ground-breaking research, and innovative applications that leverage natural language processing (NLP) capabilities on AWS. This year, the conference will primarily focus on large language models (LLMs), as they form the backbone of many generative AI applications and use cases. Register here.

AWS Global Summits – The 2023 AWS Summits season is almost coming to an end with the last two in-person events in Mexico City (August 30) and Johannesburg (September 26).

AWS Community Days – Join a community-led conference run by AWS user group leaders in your region: West Africa (August 19), Taiwan (August 26), Aotearoa (September 6), Lebanon (September 9), and Munich (September 14).

AWS re:Invent 2023AWS re:Invent (November 27 – December 1) – Join us to hear the latest from AWS, learn from experts, and connect with the global cloud community. Registration is now open.

You can browse all upcoming in-person and virtual events.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

— Antje

P.S. We’re focused on improving our content to provide a better customer experience, and we need your feedback to do so. Take this quick survey to share insights on your experience with the AWS Blog. Note that this survey is hosted by an external company, so the link doesn’t lead to our website. AWS handles your information as described in the AWS Privacy Notice.

AWS Weekly Roundup – AWS Storage Day, AWS Israel (Tel Aviv) Region, and More – Aug 8, 2023

Post Syndicated from Veliswa Boya original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-weekly-roundup-aws-storage-day-aws-israel-tel-aviv-region-and-more-aug-8-2023/

(Editor’s note: Today, we are changing the title of this regular weekly post from AWS Week in Review to AWS Weekly Roundup to better reflect the mix of recent top news and announcements as well as upcoming events you won’t want to miss.)


It’s taken me some time to finally be comfortable with being in front of a camera, a strange thing for a Developer Advocate to say I know! Last week I joined a couple of my team-mates at the AWS London Studios to record a series of videos that will be published in our Build On AWS YouTube Channel. Build On AWS is for the hands-on, technical AWS cloud builder who wants to become more agile and innovate faster. In the channel, you’ll find dynamic, high-quality content that’s designed for developers, by developers!

This video tells you more about what you’ll find in the channel. Check it out and consider subscribing to not miss out when we publish new content.

Now on to the AWS updates. There was a lot of news related to AWS last week, and I’ve compiled a few announcements and upcoming events you need to know about. Let’s get started!

Last Week’s Launches
Here are a few launches from last week that you might have missed:

Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise now available on Amazon WorkSpaces services – Amazon WorkSpaces is a fully managed, secure, and reliable virtual desktop in the AWS Cloud. With Amazon WorkSpaces, you improve IT agility and maximize user experience, while only paying for the infrastructure that you use. We announced the availability of Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise on Amazon WorkSpaces. You can bring your own Microsoft 365 licenses (if they meet Microsoft’s licensing requirements) and activate the applications at no additional cost to run Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise on Amazon WorkSpaces services.

AWS Israel (Tel Aviv) Region is Now Open – You can now securely store data in Israel while serving users in the vicinity with even lower latency. This is because last week we launched the Tel Aviv Region to give customers an additional option for running applications and serving users from data centers located in Israel.

Amazon Connect Launches – This is one of my favorite AWS services to write about because of how Amazon Connect is changing our customers’ engagement with their own customers. Last week, Amazon Connect announced automatic activity scheduling based on shift duration, custom flow block titles, and archiving and deleting flows from the UI, to name a few.

Other AWS News
A few more news items and blog posts you might have missed:

Customizable thresholds for health events supported on Amazon CloudWatch Internet Monitor – Until this announcement, the default threshold for overall availability and performance scores to invoke a health event was 95 percent. Now, you can customize the thresholds for when to invoke a health event for internet-facing traffic between your end users and your applications hosted on AWS.

Improved AWS Backup performance for Amazon S3 buckets – Now you can speed up your initial Amazon S3 backup workflow and back up buckets with more than 3 billion objects due to improvements to the speed of backups by up to 10x for buckets with more than 300 million objects. This performance improvement is automatically enabled at no additional cost in all Regions where AWS Backup support for Amazon S3 is available.

For AWS open-source news and updates, check out the latest newsletter curated by my colleague Ricardo Sueiras to bring you the most recent updates on open-source projects, posts, events, and more.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New at AWS page.

Upcoming AWS Events
We have the following upcoming events:

AWS Storage Day (August 9) – A one-day virtual event where you’ll learn how to prepare for AI/ML with the storage decisions you make now, how to do more with your budget by optimizing storage costs for on-premises and cloud data, and how to deliver holistic data protection for your organization, including recovery planning to help protect against ransomware. Learn more and register here.

AWS Summit Mexico City (August 30) – Sign up for the Summit to connect and collaborate with other like-minded folks while learning about AWS.

AWS Community Days (August 12, 19) – Join these community-led conferences where event logistics and content are planned, sourced, and delivered by community leaders: Colombia (August 12), and West Africa (August 19).

 

P.S. We’re focused on improving our content to provide a better customer experience, and we need your feedback to do so. Take this quick survey to share insights on your experience with the AWS Blog. Note that this survey is hosted by an external company, so the link doesn’t lead to our website. AWS handles your information as described in the AWS Privacy Notice.

– Veliswa