Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of all Neural Text-to-Speech (NTTS) voices in Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asian Pacific (Tokyo), EU (Frankfurt), and EU (London) Regions. You can now synthesize over 14 NTTS voices in these Regions, including the Newscaster and Conversational speaking styles. In addition, you can continue to synthesize the over 60 standard voices available in 29 languages in the Amazon Polly portfolio.

AWS Elemental MediaLive now supports Advanced Video Coding (AVC) for ultra-high definition (UHD) outputs. This allows you to incorporate an AVC UHD output in your adaptive bitrate (ABR) stacks for live channels; for example, you can create an ABR stack with one AVC output with a UHD resolution of 3840×2160, along with 1440p, 1080p, and 720p HD resolution outputs in a single output group.

Starting today, provisioning your WorkDocs site to all of your directory users is made easy. When provisioning your WorkDocs site, all directory users are provided a valid WorkDocs account, enabling each directory user to sign in and begin using full WorkDocs functionality as a Managed User without you having to manually activate each user. A Managed User has 1 TB of personal storage and can save files and collaborate with others on a WorkDocs site.  

Amazon Managed Blockchain is a fully managed service that allows you to set up and manage a scalable blockchain network with just a few clicks. Amazon Managed Blockchain eliminates the overhead required to create the network, and automatically scales to meet the demands of thousands of applications running millions of transactions. Once your network is up and running, Amazon Managed Blockchain makes it easy to manage and maintain your blockchain network. It manages your certificates and lets you easily invite new members to join the network.

Following the announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database by the open source community, we have updated Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility to support PostgreSQL version 11.8, 10.13 and 9.6.16 in all regions. This release contains bug fixes and improvements by the PostgreSQL community, and improved TLS support from PG12.

AWS Step Functions now supports payload sizes up to 256KB. Previously, the limit was 32,768 characters. Now, you can pass larger payloads in your standard and express workflows, allowing Step Functions to seamlessly coordinate multiple services like AWS Lambda, Amazon SNS, and Amazon SQS that already support larger payloads. 

Starting today, Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL supports the RDKit extension. The RDKit extension allows cheminformatics to deal with manipulation of chemical structures, fingerprinting search functions and molecular structure matching. Using PostgreSQL as a datastore, you can interact with several built-in functions to compare, manipulate and identify molecular structures via standard SQL.

AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) is now available in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), and Asia Pacific (Seoul). For a full list of the Regions where AWS SSO is available, see the AWS Region Table. 

AWS Storage Gateway increases performance for reading data from Amazon S3 for File Gateway, providing you 4x faster access to data managed through the gateway.