Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Niamh and Sofie – new Irish English and Danish female Neural Text-to-Speech (NTTS) voices for Amazon Polly. Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech, allowing you to create applications that talk and to build entirely new categories of speech-enabled products. 

Starting today, Amazon WorkSpaces provides support for the NICE DCV Extension Software Development Kit (SDK). This SDK allows customers and independent software vendors (ISVs) to build custom extensions for the Amazon WorkSpaces Streaming Protocol (WSP), which is powered by NICE DCV technology.

AWS Shield Advanced now supports AWS CloudFormation. Starting today, you can easily create and configure Shield Advanced protections against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks using a CloudFormation template. With CloudFormation, you can use a programming language or simple text file to automatically configure resource protections in a secure, efficient and repeatable way. Shield resource types available to be deployed using CloudFormation stacks across AWS regions and accounts include resource protection with automatic application-layer DDoS mitigation, Route 53 health checks, Shield Response Team (SRT) access, and proactive engagement with emergency contacts. You can also continue to configure Shield Advanced resource protections using the AWS Management Console, Command Line Interface (CLI) or API.

Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth Plus now enables customers to prepare high-quality, large-scale training datasets to fine-tune foundation models to perform human-like generative AI tasks. It also allows skilled humans to review model outputs to align them with human preferences. Additionally, it enables application builders to customize models using their industry or company data while preparing training datasets. SageMaker Ground Truth Plus provides workflows, labeling interfaces, and a skilled workforce to generate high quality training data to accomplish these tasks in a turnkey fully managed service on behalf of the customer.

Today, AWS announced the opening of a new AWS Direct Connect location within the Cirion data center in Santiago, Chile. By connecting your network to AWS at the new location, you gain private, direct access to all public AWS Regions (except those in China), AWS GovCloud Regions, and AWS Local Zones.

Starting today, Amazon AppStream now provides support for the DCV Extension Software Development Kit (SDK). This SDK allows customers and independent software vendors (ISVs) to build custom extensions for AppStream 2.0 which is powered by DCV technology.

Today, AWS announced the opening of a new AWS Direct Connect location within the Equinix BG1 Bogotá data center in Bogotá, Colombia. By connecting your network to AWS at the new location, you gain private, direct access to all public AWS Regions (except those in China), AWS GovCloud Regions, and AWS Local Zones.

Today, AWS announces the launch of the Invoice Summary feature. This feature offers additional configurations to AWS customers to reduce the overall size of the AWS Invoices.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MySQL now supports Amazon RDS Optimized Reads for up to 50% faster query processing compared to previous generation instances on Multi-AZ deployment option with two readable standby database instances. Optimized Read-enabled instances achieve faster query processing by placing temporary tables generated by MySQL on the local NVMe-based SSD block-level storage that’s physically connected to the host server. Complex queries that utilize temporary tables, such as queries involving sorts, hash aggregations, high-load joins, and Common Table Expressions (CTEs) can now execute up to 50% faster with Optimized Reads on RDS for MySQL.

Today, AWS announces the general availability of Amazon Security Lake. This service automatically centralizes security data from AWS environments, SaaS providers, on-premises environments, and cloud sources into a purpose-built data lake stored in your account. Security Lake makes it easier to analyze security data, gain a more comprehensive understanding of security across your entire organization, and improve the protection of your workloads, applications, and data. Security Lake automates the collection and management of your security data from multiple accounts and AWS Regions, so you can use your preferred analytics tools while retaining complete control and ownership over your security data. Security Lake has adopted the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF), an open standard. With OCSF support, the service normalizes and combines security data from AWS and a broad range of enterprise security data sources.