Alexa users can now inform meeting participants that they are running late to a meeting or event on the calendar, by saying “Alexa, I’m running late.” Customers can also specify how late they expect to be by saying “Alexa, I’ll be 10 min late for my next meeting.” Alexa will send a short email to all meeting participants, informing them of the delay after confirming the meeting the customer is referring to.

AWS License Manager has enhanced the application search experience, allowing you to easily identify Microsoft Windows and SQL Server instances that are using Amazon provided software licenses. With the new capability, AWS License Manager enables you to filter your search results based on whether you are using bring-your-own-license (BYOL) instances or the License Included instances provided by Amazon. This capability is available for Windows Server Datacenter Edition, SQL Server Enterprise Edition, SQL Server Standard Edition, and SQL Server Web Edition products.

Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for you to add speech-to-text capability to your applications. The real-time transcription service now supports Australian English, which expands upon the existing support for US English, British English, French, Canadian French, and US Spanish languages. The new language support expands the markets served by Amazon Transcribe to enable use cases in contact centers, media and entertainment, education, and gaming, to reach a broader global audience.

Amazon Elastic Inference has introduced new Elastic Inference Accelerators called EIA2, with up to 8GB of GPU memory. Customers can now use Amazon Elastic Inference on larger models or models that have larger input sizes for image processing, object detection, image classification, automated speech processing and natural language processing and other deep learning use cases.

AWS Single Sign-on (AWS SSO) now enables you to increase security by enabling multi-factor authentication (MFA) with authenticator applications, such as Authy and Google Authenticator that generate time-based one-time passcodes (TOTP). You can now configure AWS SSO to require users to enter an authenticator-generated TOTP code in addition to their password. MFA improves security by requiring people to know something (their password) and have something (their authenticator) before they can sign in.

AWS Managed Services is excited to announce support for 29 new AWS services. With this release, the total number of services supported by AMS is almost doubled to 61, including AWS Lambda, a much requested service. In addition to running these services within secure and operated AMS managed accounts, several can be self provisioned and configured directly in the AWS Console or the APIs. With this release, AMS is also introducing a second pricing tier that is lower for certain groups of AWS services where more of the day-to-day operations is handled by the service itself. Contact your sales representative for more details on AMS pricing.

Customers in the AWS Middle East (Bahrain) region can now use AWS Secrets Manager to manage secrets such as database passwords and API keys needed to access their applications, services, and IT resources.  

Amazon Connect now provides new APIs that enable you to programmatically list resources such as queues, phone numbers, contact flows, and hours of operations in an Amazon Connect instance. For example, now you can use the List Queues API to retrieve queue IDs at run time and use them with the queue metrics API to filter the data returned.

AWS has updated the Machine to Cloud Connectivity Framework, a solution that provides secure equipment connectivity to the AWS Cloud. The solution now supports equipment that uses the Mitsubishi Seamless Messaging Protocol (SLMP). SLMP is a unified protocol for achieving seamless communication between applications without awareness of network hierarchy or boundaries and general-purpose Ethernet devices.

AWS Managed Services (AMS) announces support for AWS Landing Zone (ALZ), a multi-account architecture recommended for enterprises looking for a scalable design for the configurations of their AWS accounts. With this release, new AMS customers will be able to choose either ALZ or the current AMS landing zone design based on their needs.