Today, AWS is announcing the general availability of web and mobile chat for Amazon Connect, giving businesses an omnichannel cloud contact center service based on the same technology used by Amazon customer service associates worldwide. Amazon Connect now makes it easy for you to offer your customers the ability to reach you by chat or by phone. By using the same routing, configuration, analytics, and management tools across voice and chat, Amazon Connect gives you a single unified contact center service across channels, simplifying contact center operations, improving agent efficiency, and lowering costs.

Amazon CloudWatch ServiceLens is a new feature that enables you to visualize and analyze the health, performance, and availability of your applications in a single place. CloudWatch ServiceLens ties together CloudWatch metrics and logs, as well as traces from AWS X-Ray to give you a complete view of your applications and their dependencies. This enables you to quickly pinpoint performance bottlenecks, isolate root causes of application issues, and determine users impacted.  

AWS Tools for PowerShell now has a new modular variant AWS.Tools with a separate module for each AWS service. Previously you had to install support for all AWS services in a single large module using AWSPowerShell.NetCore . Going forward, you can download and install the modules only relevant to your application (e.g. AWS.Tools.S3), reducing download time and memory footprint.

Today, AWS announces CloudTrail Insights, a new CloudTrail feature that helps customers identify unusual operational activity in their AWS accounts such as spikes in resource provisioning, bursts of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) actions, or gaps in periodic maintenance activity.  

Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports outbound network access removing the dependency for linked servers to be joined within a VPC. Linked servers can now have traffic configured from an RDS for SQL Server instance in AWS directing traffic to an on-premise or EC2 SQL Server instance.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 A1 instances are available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Singapore) Region. A1 instances, introduced at re:Invent 2018, are the first EC2 instances powered by AWS Graviton Processors that feature 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores and custom silicon designed by AWS. A1 instances deliver up to 45% cost savings for scale-out and Arm-based workloads. These include applications such as web servers, containerized microservices, caching fleets, and distributed data stores that are supported by the extensive Arm ecosystem. These instances will also appeal to developers, enthusiasts, and educators across the Arm developer community. 

Amazon Lex now supports sentiment analysis by natively integrating with Amazon Comprehend. Up until now, you had to implement custom logic using Amazon Comprehend APIs to assess user sentiment. Starting today, you can enable sentiment analysis for your bot with a single-click in the Amazon Lex Console. Amazon Comprehend uses natural language processing to detect the overall sentiment in text and returns value as positive, negative, neutral, or mixed. 

Amazon Transcribe now supports transcription for audio and video in Gulf Arabic, Swiss German, Hebrew, Japanese, Malay, Telugu, and Turkish languages. Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy to add speech-to-text capability to applications. Organizations can use Amazon Transcribe to create text transcripts of audio and video files quickly.

Amazon EC2 G4 instances which provide industry’s most cost-effective GPU platform for deploying machine learning models in production and graphics-intensive applications are now available in the Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) and Middle East (Bahrain) AWS regions, bringing the total number of available regions to 19. 

AWS AppSync is a managed GraphQL service that simplifies application development by letting you create a flexible API to securely access, manipulate, and combine data from one or more data sources. Today we’re releasing two important features to improve performance and consistency for applications using AppSync APIs.