AWS IQ is a professional services marketplace that connects AWS customers with AWS Certified freelancers and consulting firms with deep AWS expertise. IQ allows you to connect with experts within minutes, easily grant access to your AWS account and pay through your AWS bill when work is complete. 

Amazon Connect now enables customers to use Amazon Polly’s Neural Text-to-Speech Voices (NTTS) within their contact center across four new regions. These new voices deliver improvements in speech quality through a new machine learning approach, making automated conversations sound more lifelike by improving the pitch, inflection, intonation, and tempo. You can now use 14 NTTS voices in the London, Frankfurt, Singapore, and Tokyo regions, including the Newscaster and Conversational speaking styles. In addition, you can continue to use the over 60 standard voices available in 29 languages in the Amazon Polly portfolio.

You now can manage access to Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra), a scalable, highly available, and fully managed Cassandra-compatible database service, by using temporary security credentials for the Python, Go, and Node.js Cassandra drivers.  

AWS Systems Manager now lets you easily search for runbooks and other Systems Manager documents, such as Run Command and Distributor packages, by specifying a part of the name as the search keyword. This feature enables easy discovery of runbooks when you have a large number of runbooks in your account or when you do not remember the exact name of a runbook.  

You can now use AWS Launch Wizard to deploy and configure AWS Backint Agent, an SAP-certified backup and restore application for SAP HANA workloads running on Amazon EC2 instances. While creating a deployment with AWS Launch Wizard, you will have the option to enable backups with Backint Agent by selecting the Amazon S3 bucket where the backups will be stored and the encryption keys to use. Additionally, you can configure backups to local volumes for ad-hoc backups if needed.

Amazon EMR now supports Amazon EC2 M6g instances to deliver the best price performance for cloud workloads. Amazon EC2 M6g instances are powered by AWS Graviton2 processors that are custom designed by AWS utilizing 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores. Amazon EMR provides up to 35% lower cost and up to 15% improved performance for Spark workloads on Graviton2-based instances versus previous generation instances. In addition, the combination of EMR runtime for Apache Spark and EC2 M6g instances offer up to 76% lower total cost and 3.6 times improved performance compared to running open source Apache Spark on previous generation instances.

AWS Outposts support for AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM) lets customers share access to Outposts resources – EC2 instances, EBS volumes, subnets, and local gateways (LGWs) – across multiple accounts within an organization. With this new capability, you can enable distributed teams and business units within your organization to configure VPCs, launch and run EC2 instances, and create EBS volumes.

AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager now makes it easier for you to create patch compliance reports by providing a catalog of all patches released for Amazon Linux and Amazon Linux 2. You can now view a list of all released patches for Amazon Linux and Amazon Linux 2 even if those patches are not applicable to your fleet based on your patch rules. Further, you can view additional details such as severity, release date, and vulnerability identifier (CVE-ID) for patches in the catalog.

Amazon Rekognition is a deep-learning-based image and video analysis service that can identify objects, text, scenes, as well as support content moderation by detecting inappropriate content. Starting today, Amazon Rekognition can analyze images to detect if persons in the images are wearing Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) such as face covers (face masks), hand covers (gloves), and head covers (helmets or hard hats).

Amazon QuickSight now supports filter controls that you can place beside visuals on dashboards, allowing readers to quickly slice and dice data in the context of its visual representation. You can create these filter controls from existing or new filters with a single click, and configure them to support different operations, such as filtering specific dates, relative dates, or date ranges, setting upper and lower thresholds for numeric values, adding drop-downs with single-select or multi-select options, and more. On-sheet filter controls can be used in dashboards within Amazon QuickSight, or in dashboards embedded within apps . See blog here for more details.