Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Olivia, Polly’s first Australian English voice, available via Neural Text-to-Speech (NTTS). Thanks to its unique vocal personality, the voice sounds expressive, natural and it is easy to follow. Amazon Polly customers can now enjoy a selection of three Australian English voices: Russell, Nicole and Olivia. 

Amazon Connect enables customers to use Amazon Polly’s latest Australian-English conversational voice, Olivia. Built on Amazon Polly’s neural text-to-speech technology, this new voice delivers groundbreaking improvements in speech quality, making automated conversations sound more lifelike by improving the pitch, inflection, intonation, and tempo.

AWS Elemental MediaConvert has added a new feature called Automated ABR Configuration which automatically customizes the ABR (Adaptive Bit Rate) encoding configuration for each source video. Automated ABR Configuration simplifies the set up of transcoding, optimizes video quality, and reduces ABR package size. Automated ABR Configuration is available at no additional cost for MediaConvert jobs in the on-demand, Professional pricing tier. To learn more, please read the Automated ABR Configuration documentation .

Starting today, you can privately connect your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) to AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) without requiring an internet gateway, NAT device, VPN connection, or AWS Direct Connect connection.  

AWS Training and Certification has launched two new self-paced digital courses, Introduction to AWS Identity and Access Management and AWS IoT: Developing and Deploying an Internet of Things, on edX and Coursera. Designed for application developers, the IoT course helps you utilize AWS IoT services to build, test, and distribute applications to simulated devices. You’ll also learn how to use analytics tools to collect, process, and analyze data from IoT devices.

This free new digital training curriculum explains how to modernize a legacy, monolithic application by transforming it into a microservices-based application that uses serverless, scalable, and fully managed databases. The two-hour fundamental curriculum includes three self-paced modules with video demonstrations. It is designed for data platform engineers, database developers, and solutions architects.

FreeRTOS version 202011.00 is now available with refactored IoT and AWS libraries: coreMQTT, coreJSON, corePKCS11, and AWS IoT Device Shadow, in addition to the FreeRTOS kernel and FreeRTOS+TCP library. These refactored libraries have been optimized for modularity and memory usage for constrained microcontrollers, and have undergone code quality checks (e.g. MISRA-C compliance , Coverity static analysis ), and memory safety validation with the C Bounded Model Checker (CBMC ) automated reasoning tool. For more details on these libraries and other features of this release, see the 202011.00 release blog on FreeRTOS.org . 

You can now create Amazon Aurora database clusters with up to 128TB of storage in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. The new storage limit is available for both the MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible editions of Amazon Aurora. Previously, Aurora database instances supported 64TB of storage.

Amazon Redshift, a fully-managed cloud data warehouse, now adds native support for TIME and TIMETZ data types. TIME data type stores the time of day without timezone information, and TIMETZ stores the time of day including timezone information. This new data type builds on the existing support in Amazon Redshift for DATE, TIMESTAMP and TIMESTAMPTZ data types that can store date and date-and-time values.

We’ve updated the Amazon S3 console to make it even easier for you to manage your storage. In addition to a refreshed look and feel, the updated Amazon S3 console now simplifies common tasks by presenting contextual information about your storage resources and other S3 features throughout the console. Some key changes include streamlining the work to copy bucket settings when creating new buckets, indicating the bucket level settings you have permissions to change, improving the performance of uploads, and having a new page that gives more visibility into upload progress.