Tag Archives: Amazon Polly

AWS Weekly Roundup: 20 years of AWS News Blog, Express brokers for Amazon MSK, Windows Server 2025 images on EC2, and more (Nov 11, 2024)

Post Syndicated from Channy Yun (윤석찬) original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-weekly-roundup-20-years-of-aws-news-blog-express-brokers-for-amazon-msk-windows-server-2025-images-on-ec2-and-more-nov-11-2024/

Happy 20th Anniversary of the AWS News Blog! 🎉🥳🎊 On November 9, 2004, Jeff Barr published his first blog post. At the time, he started a personal blog site using TypePad. He wanted to speak to his readers with his personal voice, not the company or team.

On April 29, 2014, we created a new AWS blog site and migrated all posts to that page. There are currently over 4,300 posts on the AWS News Blog, with Jeff contributing over 3,200 of them.

Since December 2016, the AWS News Blog has added new writers, but we are still following Jeff’s leadership principals for AWS News Bloggers in accordance with Day One. What’s unique about the AWS News Blog is that the blog writers get to use the features of the product team in advance, following the Customer Obsession leadership principle, and focus on walk-throughs of how customers can quickly use them to save time, with the Frugality principle.

I am very grateful for Jeff’s fundamental and pivotal role over the past 20 years, and I look forward to the next 20 years!

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

New Express brokers for Amazon MSK – Express brokers are a new broker type for Amazon MSK Provisioned designed to deliver up to three times more throughput per broker, scale up to 20 times faster, and reduce recovery time by 90 percent as compared to standard Apache Kafka brokers. Express brokers come preconfigured with Kafka best practices by default, support all Kafka APIs, and provide the same low-latency performance, so you can continue using existing client applications without any changes.

New Amazon Kinesis Client Library 3.0 – You can now reduce compute costs to process streaming data by up to 33 percent with Kinesis Client Library (KCL) 3.0, compared to previous KCL versions. KCL 3.0 introduces an enhanced load balancing algorithm that continuously monitors resource utilization of the stream processing workers and automatically redistributes the load from overutilized workers to other underutilized workers. To learn more, read the AWS Big Data Blog post.

Microsoft Windows Server 2025 images on Amazon EC2 – We now support Microsoft Windows Server 2025 with License Included (LI) Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), providing customers with an easy and flexible way to launch the latest version of Windows Server. By running Windows Server 2025 on Amazon EC2, customers can take advantage of the security, performance, and reliability of AWS with the latest Windows Server features. To learn more about running Windows Server 2025 on Amazon EC2, visit Windows Workloads on AWS.

Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Haiku model in Amazon Bedrock – Claude 3.5 Haiku is the next generation of Anthropic’s fastest model, combining rapid response times with improved reasoning capabilities, making it ideal for tasks that require both speed and intelligence. Claude 3.5 Haiku improves across every skill set and surpasses even Claude 3 Opus, the largest model in Anthropic’s previous generation, on many intelligence benchmarks—including coding. To learn more, read the AWS News Blog post.

Amazon Bedrock Prompt Management GA – You can simplify the creation, testing, versioning, and sharing of prompts in Amazon Bedrock Prompt Management. At general availability, we added new features that provide enhanced options for configuring your prompts and enabling seamless integration for invoking them in your generative AI applications, such as structured prompts and Converse and InvokeModel API integration. To learn more, read the AWS Machine Learning blog post.

Six new synthetic generative voices for Amazon Polly – The generative engine is Amazon Polly’s most advanced text-to-speech (TTS) model leveraging the generative AI technology. We added six new synthetic female-sounding generative voices: Ayanda (South African English), Léa (French), Lucia (European Spanish), Lupe (American Spanish), Mía (Mexican Spanish), and Vicki (German). This extends thirteen voices and nine locales to provide you with more options of highly expressive and engaging voices.

Amazon OpenSearch Service Extended Support – We announce the end of Standard Support and Extended Support timelines for legacy Elasticsearch versions and OpenSearch Versions. Standard Support ends on Nov 7, 2025, for legacy Elasticsearch versions up to 6.7, Elasticsearch versions 7.1 through 7.8, OpenSearch versions from 1.0 through 1.2, and OpenSearch versions 2.3 through 2.9. With Extended Support, for an incremental flat fee over regular instance pricing, you continue to get critical security updates beyond the end of Standard Support. To learn more, read the AWS Big Data Blog post.

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 that you might find interesting:

CEO’s visiting at AWS data center – Matt Garman, CEO of AWS, had a great time visiting one of our AWS data centers recently, and was able to get a look at the continuous innovation delivered by the team. Of course, it’s no surprise that Amazon’s senior executives visit fulfillment centers, contact centers, and data centers, to do real work for customers. AWS data centers are designed for customers in every aspect, for maximum resilience, performance, and energy efficiency.

AWS supports small businesses, creates jobs, sets up sustainability initiatives, and develops educational programs near AWS data centers. Get the latest updates – AWS in your community: Here’s what’s happening near data centers across the US on About Amazon News.

Amazon Q Business at Amazon – I introduced an Amazon story to use Code transformation in Amazon Q Developer to migrate more than old 30,000 Java applications to Java 17 version. It saved over 4,500 developer years of effort compared to previous manual jobs and saved the company $260 million in annual by moving to the latest Java version.

Here is another dogfooding story of Amazon Q Business at Amazon. Amazon built an internal chatbot with Amazon Q Business and it has resolved over 1 million internal Amazon developer questions, reducing time spent churning on manual technical investigations by more than 450,000 hours.

Our team onboarded Amazon Q Business with millions of internal documents and integrated Q Business into the tools our team use every day. Now, instead of waiting hours for responses to complex technical questions on Q&A boards or Slack channels, developers can get answers in seconds.

TOURCast at PGA TOUR – If you enjoy golf, this news will be of interest to you. The PGA TOUR debuted TOURCast in Japan at the 2024 ZOZO Championship to capture and disseminate better statistical data and bring fans closer to the game based on new scoring system called ShotLink, powered by CDW. This marks the first time the PGA TOUR has been able to bring this technology to Asia, leveraging the flexibility and scalability of AWS to overcome unique challenges.


PGA TOUR volunteer setting up GPS equipment on the fairway at ZOZO championship that will input specific shot data and feed back to Shotlink Select Plus. [IMAGE: PGA TOUR]

They’ve completely rebuilt their scoring system over the past two years on a new cloud stack. With AWS cloud, whether data comes from high-tech radar systems, cameras, or manual input, the system processes it all seamlessly.

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

AWS GenAI Lofts – AWS GenAI Lofts are about more than just the tech, they bring together startups, developers, investors, and industry experts. Whether you’re looking to gain deep insights, or get your questions answered by generative AI pros, our GenAI Lofts have you covered, and provide everything you need to start building your next innovation. Join events in São Paulo (through November 20), and Paris (through November 25).

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: Jakarta, Indonesia (November 23), Kochi, India (December 14).

AWS re:Invent – You can still register for the annual learning event, taking place December 2–6 in Las Vegas. Surprisingly Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon said he will come back and participate in AWS re:Invent this year. He said “As always, the priority is to make this a learning event so customers can take nuggets back and change their own customer experiences and businesses. We’ll also have a bunch of goodies for you that we’ll announce and that we think folks will like.” Let’s meet there!

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!

AWS Weekly Roundup: What’s App, AWS Lambda, Load Balancers, AWS Console, and more (Oct 14, 2024).

Post Syndicated from Sébastien Stormacq original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-weekly-roundup-whats-app-aws-lambda-load-balancers-aws-console-and-more-oct-14-2024/

Last week, AWS hosted free half-day conferences in London and Paris. My colleagues and I demonstrated how developers can use generative AI tools to speed up their design, analysis, code writing, debugging, and deployment workflows. These events were held at the GenAI Lofts. These lofts are open until October 25 (London) and November 5 (Paris). They will be packed with events, conferences, workshops, and meetups. If you’re around, be sure to check the agenda (London, Paris).

The AWS team at the NGDE day in London Veliswa live coding on stage at NGDE Day London

Our well-known AWS News blog co-author Veliswa did an amazing demo. She live-coded a Duolingo-like app from scratch, just using suggestions and reviews from Amazon Q Developer.

Now, let’s turn to other exciting news in the AWS universe from last week.

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

Bring your conversations to WhatsApp — AWS has added support for What’sApp to AWS End User Messaging, so developers can reach users on WhatsApp with multimedia and interactive messaging options. This feature integrates with SMS and push notifications already available. Developers can get started quickly using AWS Management Console.

Amazon Redshift data sharing with data lake tables — This offers a secure and convenient way to share live data lake tables across different Amazon Redshift warehouses. Data sharing of data lake tables in AWS Glue Data Catalog provides live access to the data, so you always see the most up-to-date and consistent information as it’s updated in the data lake.

Zonal shift and zonal autoshift for cross zoned Network Load Balancer — Network Load Balancer (NLB) now supports the Amazon Application Recovery Controller zonal shift and zonal autoshift features on load balancers that are enabled across zones. With Zonal shift, you can quickly shift traffic away from an impaired Availability Zone and recover from events such as bad application deployment and gray failures. Zonal autoshift safely and automatically shifts your traffic away from an Availability Zone when AWS identifies a potential impact to it.

Console to Code to generate infrastructure as a service code — This is by far my favorite launch of the week. Console to Code makes it simple, fast, and cost-effective to move from prototyping in the AWS Management Console to building code for production deployments. You can generate code for their console actions in their preferred format with a single click. The generated code helps you get started and bootstrap your automation pipelines for tasks. Console to Code is powered by Amazon Q Developer.

A new getting started experience for AWS CodePipeline — AWS Data Pipeline introduces a simplified and new getting started experience so you can quickly create new pipelines. When you create a new pipeline using the CodePipeline console, you can now select from a list of pipeline templates across build, automation, and deployment use cases. After selecting a pipeline template, you will be prompted to enter values for the action configuration fields in the pipeline definition, and completing the process will render a fully configured pipeline that’s ready to run.

AWS Lambda detects and stops recursive loops between Lambda and Amazon S3 — Lambda recursive loop detection can now automatically detect and stop recursive loops between AWS Lambda and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Lambda recursive loop detection, which is enabled by default, is a preventative guardrail that automatically detects and stops recursive invocations between Lambda and other supported services, preventing unintended usage and billing from runaway workloads.

Amazon MemoryDB for Valkey — Amazon MemoryDB for Redis is a fully managed, Valkey– and Redis OSS-compatible database service, which provides multi-AZ durability, microsecond read and single-digit millisecond write latency, and high throughput. It is ideal for use cases such as caching, leaderboards, and session stores. With MemoryDB for Valkey, you can benefit from a fully managed experience built on open-source technology while using the security, operational excellence, and reliability that AWS provides. MemoryDB for Valkey also delivers the fastest vector search performance at the highest recall rates among popular vector databases on AWS.

Amazon Polly adds four wew English voices for the generative engine and expands to three Regions — Polly is a managed service that turns text into lifelike speech, so you can create applications that talk and to build speech-enabled products depending on your business needs. The generative engine is the most advanced Amazon Polly text-to-speech (TTS) model. With this launch, we add a variety of new synthetic generative English voices to the Amazon Polly portfolio: an Australian English voice Olivia and three US English voices Joanna, Danielle, and Stephen. These voices have more natural pronunciation and prosody. You can use this high-tier product in various industries and for different purposes such as education, publishing, or marketing.

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

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

AWS Cloud Day Prague — Join us for a free technical conferences in Prague on October 23. I will be there and share with attendees “The Art of Transforming a Foundation Model into a Domain Expert”. Be sure to register today!

Innovate Migrate, Modernize, and Build — Whether you are new to the cloud or an experienced user, you will learn something new at AWS Innovate. This is a free online conference. Register for a time and region convenient to North America (October 15), or Europe, Middle East & Africa (October 24).

AWS Community Days — Join community-led conferences featuring technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs led by expert AWS users and industry leaders from around the world. Don’t miss out on the AWS Community Days happening on October 19 in Vadodara, Spain, and Guatemala.

AWS re:Invent 2024 — Registration is now open for the annual tech extravaganza, taking place December 2 – 6 in Las Vegas. Beside recording podcast episodes, I will present three sessions:

  • CMP410 | Accelerate testing cycles of CI/CD pipelines with EC2 Mac instances (with Vishal)
  • DEV301 | The art of transforming foundation models into domain experts (with Gregory)
  • DEV334 | Swift, server-side, serverless

There are just a few seats left for these three sessions, so be sure to book your seat today!

Browse more 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!

— 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 capabilities in Amazon Bedrock, AWS Amplify Gen 2, Amazon RDS and more (May 13, 2024)

Post Syndicated from Abhishek Gupta original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-weekly-roundup-new-capabilities-in-amazon-bedrock-aws-amplify-gen-2-amazon-rds-and-more-may-13-2024/

AWS Summit is in full swing around the world, with the most recent one being AWS Summit Singapore! Here is a sneak peek of the AWS staff and ASEAN community members at the Developer Lounge booth. It featured AWS Community speakers giving lightning talks on serverless, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), security, generative AI, and more.

Last week’s launches
Here are some launches that caught my attention. Not surprisingly, a lot of interesting generative AI features!

Amazon Titan Text Premier is now available in Amazon Bedrock – This is the latest addition to the Amazon Titan family of large language models (LLMs) and offers optimized performance for key features like Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) on Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock, and function calling on Agents for Amazon Bedrock.

Amazon Bedrock Studio is now available in public preview – Amazon Bedrock Studio offers a web-based experience to accelerate the development of generative AI applications by providing a rapid prototyping environment with key Amazon Bedrock features, including Knowledge Bases, Agents, and Guardrails.

Amazon Bedrock Studio

Agents for Amazon Bedrock now supports Provisioned Throughput pricing model – As agentic applications scale, they require higher input and output model throughput compared to on-demand limits. The Provisioned Throughput pricing model makes it possible to purchase model units for the specific base model.

MongoDB Atlas is now available as a vector store in Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock – With MongoDB Atlas vector store integration, you can build RAG solutions to securely connect your organization’s private data sources to foundation models (FMs) in Amazon Bedrock.

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL supports pgvector 0.7.0 – You can use the open-source PostgreSQL extension for storing vector embeddings and add retrieval-augemented generation (RAG) capability in your generative AI applications. This release includes features that increase the number of dimensions of vectors you can index, reduce index size, and includes additional support for using CPU SIMD in distance computations. Also Amazon RDS Performance Insights now supports the Oracle Multitenant configuration on Amazon RDS for Oracle.

Amazon EC2 Inf2 instances are now available in new regions – These instances are optimized for generative AI workloads and are generally available in the Asia Pacific (Sydney), Europe (London), Europe (Paris), Europe (Stockholm), and South America (Sao Paulo) Regions.

New Generative Engine in Amazon Polly is now generally available – The generative engine in Amazon Polly is it’s most advanced text-to-speech (TTS) model and currently includes two American English voices, Ruth and Matthew, and one British English voice, Amy.

AWS Amplify Gen 2 is now generally available – AWS Amplify offers a code-first developer experience for building full-stack apps using TypeScript and enables developers to express app requirements like the data models, business logic, and authorization rules in TypeScript. AWS Amplify Gen 2 has added a number of features since the preview, including a new Amplify console with features such as custom domains, data management, and pull request (PR) previews.

Amazon EMR Serverless now includes performance monitoring of Apache Spark jobs with Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus – This lets you analyze, monitor, and optimize your jobs using job-specific engine metrics and information about Spark event timelines, stages, tasks, and executors. Also, Amazon EMR Studio is now available in the Asia Pacific (Melbourne) and Israel (Tel Aviv) Regions.

Amazon MemoryDB launched two new condition keys for IAM policies – The new condition keys let you create AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies or Service Control Policies (SCPs) to enhance security and meet compliance requirements. Also, Amazon ElastiCache has updated it’s minimum TLS version to 1.2.

Amazon Lightsail now offers a larger instance bundle – This includes 16 vCPUs and 64 GB memory. You can now scale your web applications and run more compute and memory-intensive workloads in Lightsail.

Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) adds pull through cache support for GitLab Container Registry – ECR customers can create a pull through cache rule that maps an upstream registry to a namespace in their private ECR registry. Once rule is configured, images can be pulled through ECR from GitLab Container Registry. ECR automatically creates new repositories for cached images and keeps them in-sync with the upstream registry.

AWS Resilience Hub expands application resilience drift detection capabilities – This new enhancement detects changes, such as the addition or deletion of resources within the application’s input sources.

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 projects and blog posts that you might find interesting.

Building games with LLMs – Check out this fun experiment by Banjo Obayomi to generate Super Mario levels using different LLMs on Amazon Bedrock!

Troubleshooting with Amazon Q –  Ricardo Ferreira walks us through how he solved a nasty data serialization problem while working with Apache Kafka, Go, and Protocol Buffers.

Getting started with Amazon Q in VS Code – Check out this excellent step-by-step guide by Rohini Gaonkar that covers installing the extension for features like code completion chat, and productivity-boosting capabilities powered by generative AI.

AWS open source news and updates – My colleague Ricardo writes about open source projects, tools, and events from the AWS Community. Check out Ricardo’s page for the latest updates.

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

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: Bengaluru (May 15–16), Seoul (May 16–17), Hong Kong (May 22), Milan (May 23), Stockholm (June 4), and Madrid (June 5).

AWS re:Inforce – Explore 2.5 days of immersive cloud security learning in the age of generative AI at AWS re:Inforce, June 10–12 in Pennsylvania.

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: Turkey (May 18), Midwest | Columbus (June 13), Sri Lanka (June 27), Cameroon (July 13), Nigeria (August 24), and New York (August 28).

Browse all 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!

— Abhishek

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

A new generative engine and three voices are now generally available on Amazon Polly

Post Syndicated from Channy Yun original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/a-new-generative-engine-and-three-voices-are-now-generally-available-on-amazon-polly/

Today, we are announcing the general availability of the generative engine of Amazon Polly with three voices: Ruth and Matthew in American English and Amy in British English. The new generative engine was trained with publicly available and proprietary data, a variety of voices, languages, and styles. It performs with the highest precision to render context-dependent prosody, pausing, spelling, dialectal properties, foreign word pronunciation, and more.

Amazon Polly is a machine learning (ML) service that converts text to lifelike speech, called text-to-speech (TTS) technology. Now, Amazon Polly includes high-quality, natural-sounding human-like voices in dozens of languages, so you can select the ideal voice and distribute your speech-enabled applications in many locales or countries.

With Amazon Polly, you can select various voice options, including neural, long-form, and generative voices, which deliver ground-breaking improvements in speech quality and produce human-like, highly expressive, and emotionally adept voices. You can store speech output in standard formats like MP3 or OGG, adjust the speech rate, pitch, or volume with Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) tags, and quickly deliver lifelike voices and conversational user experiences with consistently fast response times.

What’s the new generative engine?
Amazon Polly now supports four voice engines: standard, neural, long-form, and generative voices.

Standard TTS voices, introduced in 2016 use traditional concatenative synthesis. This method strings together the phonemes of recorded speech, producing very natural-sounding synthesized speech. However, the inevitable variations in speech and the techniques used to segment the waveforms limit the quality of speech.

Neural TTS (NTTS) voices, introduced in 2019, use a sequence-to-sequence neural network that converts a sequence of phonemes into spectrograms, and a neural vocoder that converts the spectrograms into a continuous audio signal. The NTTS produces even higher quality human-like voices than its standard voices.

Long-form voices, introduced in 2023, are developed with cutting-edge deep learning TTS technology and designed to captivate listeners’ attention for longer content, such as news articles, training materials, or marketing videos.

In February 2024, Amazon scientists introduced a new research TTS model called Big Adaptive Streamable TTS with Emergent abilities (BASE). With this technology, Polly Generative engine is able to create human-like synthetically generated voices. You can use these voices as a knowledgeable customer assistant, a virtual trainer, or an experienced marketer.

Here are the new generative voices:

Name Locale Gender Language Sample prompt NTTS voices
 Generative voices
Ruth en_US Female English (US) Selma was lying on the ground halfway down the steps. 'Selma! Selma!' we shouted in panic.
Matthew en_US Male English (US) The guards were standing outside with some of our neighbours, listening to a transistor radio. 'Any good news?' I asked. 'No, we're listening to the names of people who were killed yesterday,' Bruno replied.
Amy en_GB Female English (British) What are you looking at?' he said as he stood over me. They got off the bus and started searching the baggage compartment. The tension on the bus was like a dark, menacing cloud that hovered above us.

You can choose from these voice options to suit your application and use case. To learn more about the generative engine, visit Generative voices in the AWS documentation.

Get started with using generative voices
You can access the new voices using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), or the AWS SDKs.

To get started, go to the Amazon Polly console in the US (N. Virginia) Region and choose Text-to-Speech menu in the left pane. If you select the voice of Ruth or Matthew in the language of English, US or Amy in English, UK, you can choose Generative engine. Input your text and listen to or download the generated voice output.

Using the CLI, you can list the voices that use the new generative engine:

$ aws polly describe-voices --output json --region us-east-1 \
| jq -r '.Voices[] | select(.SupportedEngines | index("generative")) | .Name'

Matthew
Amy
Ruth

Now, run the synthesize-speech CLI command to synthesize sample text to an audio file (hello.mp3) with the parameters of generative engine and a supported voice ID.

$ aws polly synthesize-speech --output-format mp3 --region us-east-1 \
  --text "Hello. This is my first generative voices!" \
  --voice-id Matthew --engine generative hello.mp3

To learn more code examples using AWS SDKs, visit Code and Application Examples in the AWS documentation. You can use Java and Python code examples, application examples such as web applications using Java or Python, or iOS and Android applications.

Now available
The new generative voices of Amazon Polly are now available today in the US East (N. Virginia) Region. You only pay for what you use based on the number of characters of text that you convert to speech. To learn more, visit our Amazon Polly Pricing page.

Give new generative voices a try in the Amazon Polly console today and send feedback to AWS re:Post for Amazon Polly or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

— Channy

New – Long-Form voices for Amazon Polly

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-long-form-voices-for-amazon-polly/

We are launching three new voices for Polly. Powered by a new long-form engine, the voices are natural and expressive, with appropriate pauses, emphasis, and tone.

New Voices
The new long-form voices are perfect for blog posts, news articles, training videos, and marketing content. The underlying Machine Learning model extracts meaning from the text, learning about speech segments, prosody (the pattern of rhythm and pauses), intonation, and other aspects of expressive speech, allowing the synthesized audio to express emotions, especially in dialogs. The new long-form engine uses a deep learning text-to-speech (TTS) model trained to acquire a contextual understanding of the text that allows it to express prosody in an appropriate way. This allows the intention of the story to drive the vocal performance and create the correct emphasis, pauses, and tones of a realistic human voice.

Here are the new voices:

Name Locale Gender Language Sample
Danielle en_US Female English (US)
Gregory en_US Male English (US)
Ruth en_US Female English (US)

Using the New Voices
You can access the new voices using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), or the AWS SDKs. Using the CLI, I start by listing the voices that use the new long-form engine:

$ aws --region us-east-1 polly describe-voices --output json \
  | jq -r '.Voices[] | select(.SupportedEngines | index("long-form")) | .Name'
Danielle
Gregory
Ruth

I can pick one, or I can try all of them:

for v in `aws polly describe-voices --output json \
          | jq -r '.Voices[] | select(.SupportedEngines | index("long-form")) | .Name'`; do
    Text="Hello my name is $v and I can read blog posts, articles, \
and other long-form content for you. I am the best\!"
    aws polly synthesize-speech --output-format 'mp3' \
    --text "$Text" --voice-id $v $v.mp3 --engine long-form; \
    aws s3 cp $v.mp3 s3://jbarr-voices; \
done

My shell script had a small quoting bug, but the resulting audio was too funny not to include!

Programmatically, you can reproduce my example by writing code that calls the DescribeVoices and SynthesizeSpeech functions.

Things to Know
Here are some interesting things that you should know about the new voices:

Pricing – Long-form voices are priced at $100 per million characters or Speech Marks requests. Check out the Amazon Polly Pricing page to learn more.

Engines & Voices – Some of the voices that I listed above can be used with more than one engine. For example, the Danielle voice can be used with the new long-form engine and the existing neural engine.

Regions – The new engine and voices are available in the US East (N. Virginia) Region.

Check out the new voices, build something awesome, and let me know what you think!

— Jeff;

Week in Review – February 13, 2023

Post Syndicated from Sébastien Stormacq original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/week-in-review-february-13-2023/

AWS announced 32 capabilities since we published the last Week in Review blog post a week ago. I also read a couple of other news and blog posts.

Here is my summary.

The VPC section of the AWS Management Console now allows you to visualize your VPC resources, such as the relationships between a VPC and its subnets, routing tables, and gateways. This visualization was available at VPC creation time only, and now you can go back to it using the Resource Map tab in the console. You can read the details in Channy’s blog post.

CloudTrail Lake now gives you the ability to ingest activity events from non-AWS sources. This lets you immutably store and then process activity events without regard to their origin–AWS, on-premises servers, and so forth. All of this power is available to you with a single API call: PutAuditEvents. We launched AWS CloudTrail Lake about a year ago. It is a managed organization-scale data lake that aggregates, immutably stores, and allows querying of events recorded by CloudTrail. You can use it for auditing, security investigation, and troubleshooting. Again, my colleague Channy wrote a post with the details.

There are three new Amazon CloudWatch metrics for asynchronous AWS Lambda function invocations: AsyncEventsReceived, AsyncEventAge, and AsyncEventsDropped. These metrics provide visibility for asynchronous Lambda function invocations. They help you to identify the root cause of processing issues such as throttling, concurrency limit, function errors, processing latency because of retries, or missing events. You can learn more and have access to a sample application in this blog post.

Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) now supports AWS X-Ray to visualize, analyze, and debug applications. Developers can now trace messages going through Amazon SNS, making it easier to understand or debug microservices or serverless applications.

Amazon EC2 Mac instances now support replacing root volumes for quick instance restoration. Stopping and starting EC2 Mac instances trigger a scrubbing workflow that can take up to one hour to complete. Now you can swap the root volume of the instance with an EBS snapshot or an AMI. It helps to reset your instance to a previous known state in 10–15 minutes only. This significantly speeds up your CI and CD pipelines.

Amazon Polly launches two new Japanese NTTS voices. Neural Text To Speech (NTTS) produces the most natural and human-like text-to-speech voices possible. You can try these voices in the Polly section of the AWS Management Console. With this addition, according to my count, you can now choose among 52 NTTS voices in 28 languages or language variants (French from France or from Quebec, for example).

The AWS SDK for Java now includes the AWS CRT HTTP Client. The HTTP client is the center-piece powering our SDKs. Every single AWS API call triggers a network call to our API endpoints. It is therefore important to use a low-footprint and low-latency HTTP client library in our SDKs. AWS created a common HTTP client for all SDKs using the C programming language. We also offer 11 wrappers for 11 programming languages, from C++ to Swift. When you develop in Java, you now have the option to use this common HTTP client. It provides up to 76 percent cold start time reduction on AWS Lambda functions and up to 14 percent less memory usage compared to the Netty-based HTTP client provided by default. My colleague Zoe has more details in her blog post.

X in Y Jeff started this section a while ago to list the expansion of new services and capabilities to additional Regions. I noticed 10 Regional expansions this week:

Other AWS News
This week, I also noticed these AWS news items:

My colleague Mai-Lan shared some impressive customer stories and metrics related to the use and scale of Amazon S3 Glacier. Check it out to learn how to put your cold data to work.

Space is the final (edge) frontier. I read this blog post published on avionweek.com. It explains how AWS helps to deploy AIML models on observation satellites to analyze image quality before sending them to earth, saving up to 40 percent satellite bandwidth. Interestingly, the main cause for unusable satellite images is…clouds.

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

AWS re:Invent recaps in your area. During the re:Invent week, we had lots of new announcements, and in the next weeks, you can find in your area a recap of all these launches. All the events are posted on this site, so check it regularly to find an event nearby.

AWS re:Invent keynotes, leadership sessions, and breakout sessions are available on demand. I recommend that you check the playlists and find the talks about your favorite topics in one collection.

AWS Summits season will restart in Q2 2023. The dates and locations will be announced here. Paris and Sidney are kicking off the season on April 4th. You can register today to attend these in-person, free events (Paris, Sidney).

Stay Informed
That was my selection for this week! To better keep up with all of this news, do not forget to check out the following resources:

— seb
This post is part of our Week in Review series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!

AWS Week In Review — September 26, 2022

Post Syndicated from Sébastien Stormacq original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-week-in-review-september-26-2022/

It looks like my travel schedule is coupled with this Week In Review series of blog posts. This week, I am traveling to Fort-de-France in the French Caribbean islands to meet our customers and partners. I enjoy the travel time when I am offline. It gives me the opportunity to reflect on the past or plan for the future.

Last Week’s Launches
Here are some of the launches that caught my eye last week:

Amazon SageMaker Autopilot – has added a new Ensemble training mode powered by AutoGluon that is 8X faster than the current Hyper parameter Optimization Mode and supports a wide range of algorithms, including LightGBM, CatBoost, XGBoost, Random Forest, Extra Trees, linear models, and neural networks based on PyTorch and FastAI.

AWS Outposts and Amazon EKS – You can now deploy both the worker nodes and the Kubernetes control plane on an Outposts rack. This allows you to maximize your application availability in case of temporary network disconnection on premises. The Kubernetes control plane continues to manage the worker nodes, and no pod eviction happens when on-premises network connectivity is reestablished.

Amazon Corretto 19 – Corretto is a no-cost, multiplatform, production-ready distribution of OpenJDK. Corretto is distributed by Amazon under an open source license. This version supports the latest OpenJDK feature release and is available on Linux, Windows, and macOS. You can download Corretto 19 from our downloads page.

Amazon CloudWatch Evidently – Evidently is a fully-managed service that makes it easier to introduce experiments and launches in your application code. Evidently adds support for Client Side Evaluations (CSE) for AWS Lambda, powered by AWS AppConfig. Evidently CSE allows application developers to generate feature evaluations in single-digit milliseconds from within their own Lambda functions. Check the client-side evaluation documentation to learn more.

Amazon S3 on AWS Outposts – S3 on Outposts now supports object versioning. Versioning helps you to locally preserve, retrieve, and restore each version of every object stored in your buckets. Versioning objects makes it easier to recover from both unintended user actions and application failures.

Amazon Polly – Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech. This week, we announced the general availability of Hiujin, Amazon Polly’s first Cantonese-speaking neural text-to-speech (NTTS) voice. With this launch, the Amazon Polly portfolio now includes 96 voices across 34 languages and language variants.

X in Y – We launched existing AWS services in additional Regions:

Other AWS News
Introducing the Smart City Competency program – The AWS Smart City Competency provides best-in-class partner recommendations to our customers and the broader market. With the AWS Smart City Competency, you can quickly and confidently identify AWS Partners to help you address Smart City focused challenges.

An update to IAM role trust policy behavior – This is potentially a breaking change. AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is changing an aspect of how role trust policy evaluation behaves when a role assumes itself. Previously, roles implicitly trusted themselves. AWS is changing role assumption behavior to always require self-referential role trust policy grants. This change improves consistency and visibility with regard to role behavior and privileges. This blog post shares the details and explains how to evaluate if your roles are impacted by this change and what to modify. According to our data, only 0.0001 percent of roles are impacted. We notified by email the account owners.

Amazon Music Unifies Music Queuing – The Amazon Music team published a blog post to explain how they created a unified music queue across devices. They used AWS AppSync and AWS Amplify to build a robust solution that scales to millions of music lovers.

Upcoming AWS Events
Check your calendar and sign up for an AWS event in your Region and language:

AWS re:Invent – Learn the latest from AWS and get energized by the community present in Las Vegas, Nevada. Registrations are open for re:Invent 2022 which will be held from Monday, November 28 to Friday, December 2.

AWS Summits – Come together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. Registration is open for the following in-person AWS Summits: Bogotá (October 4), and Singapore (October 6).

Natural Language Processing (NLP) Summit – The AWS NLP Summit 2022 will host over 25 sessions focusing on the latest trends, hottest research, and innovative applications leveraging NLP capabilities on AWS. It is happening at our UK headquarters in London, October 5–6, and you can register now.

AWS Innovate for every app – This regional online conference is designed to inspire and educate executives and IT professionals about AWS. It offers dozens of technical sessions in eight languages (English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Indonesian). Register today: Americas, September 28; Europe, Middle-East, and Africa, October 6; Asia Pacific & Japan, October 20.

AWS Innovate for every app

AWS Community Days – AWS Community Day events are community-led conferences to share and learn with one another. In September, the AWS community in the US will run events in Arlington, Virginia (September 30). In Europe, Community Day events will be held in October. Join us in Amersfoort, Netherlands (October 3), Warsaw, Poland (October 14), and Dresden, Germany (October 19).

AWS Tour du Cloud – The AWS Team in France has prepared a roadshow to meet customers and partners with a one-day free conference in seven cities across the country (Aix en Provence, Lille, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Strasbourg, Nantes, and Lyon), and in Fort-de-France, Martinique. Tour du Cloud France

AWS Fest – This third-party event will feature AWS influencers, community heroes, industry leaders, and AWS customers, all sharing AWS optimization secrets (this week on Wednesday, September). You can register for AWS Fest here.

Stay Informed
That is my selection for this week! To better keep up with all of this news, please check out the following resources:

— seb
This post is part of our Week in Review series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!

AWS Week in Review – May 2, 2022

Post Syndicated from Steve Roberts original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-week-in-review-may-2-2022/

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

Wow, May already! Here in the Pacific Northwest, spring is in full bloom and nature has emerged completely from her winter slumbers. It feels that way here at AWS, too, with a burst of new releases and updates and our in-person summits and other events now in full flow. Two weeks ago, we had the San Francisco summit; last week, we held the London summit and also our .NET Enterprise Developer Day virtual event in EMEA. This week we have the Madrid summit, with more summits and events to come in the weeks ahead. Be sure to check the events section at the end of this post for a summary and registration links.

Last week’s launches
Here are some of the launches and updates last week that caught my eye:

If you’re looking to reduce or eliminate the operational overhead of managing your Apache Kafka clusters, then the general availability of Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) Serverless will be of interest. Starting with the original release of Amazon MSK in 2019, the work needed to set up, scale, and manage Apache Kafka has been reduced, requiring just minutes to create a cluster. With Amazon MSK Serverless, the provisioning, scaling, and management of the required resources is automated, eliminating the undifferentiated heavy-lift. As my colleague Marcia notes in her blog post, Amazon MSK Serverless is a perfect solution when getting started with a new Apache Kafka workload where you don’t know how much capacity you will need or your applications produce unpredictable or highly variable throughput and you don’t want to pay for idle capacity.

Another week, another set of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances! This time around, it’s new storage-optimized I4i instances based on the latest generation Intel Xeon Scalable (Ice Lake) Processors. These new instances are ideal for workloads that need minimal latency, and fast access to data held on local storage. Examples of these workloads include transactional databases such as MySQL, Oracle DB, and Microsoft SQL Server, as well as NoSQL databases including MongoDB, Couchbase, Aerospike, and Redis. Additionally, workloads that benefit from very high compute performance per TB of storage (for example, data analytics and search engines) are also an ideal target for these instance types, which offer up to 30 TB of AWS Nitro SSD storage.

Deploying AWS compute and storage services within telecommunications providers’ data centers, at the edge of the 5G networks, opens up interesting new possibilities for applications requiring end-to-end low latency (for example, delivery of high-resolution and high-fidelity live video streaming, and improved augmented/virtual reality (AR/VR) experiences). The first AWS Wavelength deployments started in the US in 2020, and have expanded to additional countries since. This week we announced the opening of the first Canadian AWS Wavelength zone, in Toronto.

Other AWS News
Some other launches and news items you may have missed:

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) had a busy week. I don’t have room to list them all, so below is just a subset of updates!

  • The addition of IPv6 support enables customers to simplify their networking stack. The increase in address space offered by IPv6 removes the need to manage overlapping address spaces in your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)s. IPv6 addressing can be enabled on both new and existing RDS instances.
  • Customers in the Asia Pacific (Sydney) and Asia Pacific (Singapore) Regions now have the option to use Multi-AZ deployments to provide enhanced availability and durability for Amazon RDS DB instances, offering one primary and two readable standby database instances spanning three Availability Zones (AZs). These deployments benefit from up to 2x faster transaction commit latency, and automated fail overs, typically under 35 seconds.
  • Amazon RDS PostgreSQL users can now choose from General-Purpose M6i and Memory-Optimized R6i instance types. Both of these sixth-generation instance types are AWS Nitro System-based, delivering practically all of the compute and memory resources of the host hardware to your instances.
  • Applications using RDS Data API can now elect to receive SQL results as a simplified JSON string, making it easier to deserialize results to an object. Previously, the API returned a JSON string as an array of data type and value pairs, which required developers to write custom code to parse the response and extract the values, so as to translate the JSON string into an object. Applications that use the API to receive the previous JSON format are still supported and will continue to work unchanged.

Applications using Amazon Interactive Video Service (IVS), offering low-latency interactive video experiences, can now add a livestream chat feature, complete with built-in moderation, to help foster community participation in livestreams using Q&A discussions. The new chat support provides chat room resource management and a messaging API for sending, receiving, and moderating chat messages.

Amazon Polly now offers a new Neural Text-to-Speech (TTS) voice, Vitória, for Brazilian Portuguese. The original Vitória voice, dating back to 2016, used standard technology. The new voice offers a more natural-sounding rhythm, intonation, and sound articulation. In addition to Vitória, Polly also offers a second Brazilian Portuguese neural voice, Camila.

Finally, if you’re a .NET developer who’s modernizing .NET Framework applications to run in the cloud, then the announcement that the open-source CoreWCF project has reached its 1.0 release milestone may be of interest. AWS is a major contributor to the project, a port of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), to run on modern cross-platform .NET versions (.NET Core 3.1, or .NET 5 or higher). This project benefits all .NET developers working on WCF applications, not just those on AWS. You can read more about the project in my blog post from last year, where I spoke with one of the contributing AWS developers. Congratulations to all concerned on reaching the 1.0 milestone!

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

Upcoming AWS Events
As I mentioned earlier, the AWS Summits are in full flow, with some some virtual and in-person events in the very near future you may want to check out:

I’m also happy to share that I’ll be joining the AWS on Air crew at AWS Summit Washington, DC. This in-person event is coming up May 23–25. Be sure to tune in to the livestream for all the latest news from the event, and if you’re there in person feel free to come say hi!

Registration is also now open for re:MARS, our conference for topics related to machine learning, automation, robotics, and space. The conference will be in-person in Las Vegas, June 21–24.

That’s all the news I have room for this week — check back next Monday for another week in review!

— Steve