You can now define your infrastructure and applications in AWS CloudFormation with reusable building blocks called modules. A module encapsulates one or more resources and their respective configurations for reuse across your organization.  

Today, we are excited to announce the addition of German and Latin American Spanish language support to Amazon Lex. Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text. Amazon Lex provides deep learning powered automatic speech recognition (ASR) for converting speech to text, and natural language understanding (NLU) to recognize the intent of the text, to enable you to build applications with highly engaging user experiences and lifelike conversational interactions.  

You can now create richer customer experiences and resolve issues faster by using interactive messages in Amazon Connect Chat. Interactive messages enable you to send prompts and pre-configured response options, eliminating the need for a customer to manually type in their reply. For example, customers can choose a recent order they need help with or select their preferred appointment time from a list of options simply by clicking on it.  Powered by Amazon Lex, interactive messages allow you to create personalized, self-service experiences for your customers using the same chatbots that you’re already using for Amazon Connect Voice and Chat. Interactive messages help to increase chatbot accuracy, reduce customer friction, and increase self-service rates. If a contact is escalated from a chatbot to an agent, the agent can see the prompt and the customer’s reply, ensuring that the full context of the conversation is available to the agent without the customer having to repeat themselves.

AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) now enables you to create fine-grained permissions for your workforce in AWS using attributes, such as cost center and department, defined in your AWS SSO identity source. Your administrators can now implement attribute-based access control (ABAC) with AWS SSO to centrally manage access to your AWS accounts and simplify permissions management at scale.

Amazon Transcribe Medical is a HIPAA-eligible automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for developers to add speech-to-text capabilities to their healthcare and life science applications. Up until now, Amazon Transcribe Medical can transcribe speech for medical specialties under the broader Primary Care umbrella such as internal medicine, family medicine, obstetrics-gynecology (OB-GYN), and pediatrics. Starting today, the service expands streaming transcription support for five new medical specialties covering cardiology, oncology, neurology, radiology, and urology. 

AWS Config lets you assess, audit, and evaluate how your AWS resources are configured, and helps you determine your overall compliance against the configurations specified in your internal guidelines. You can use AWS Config aggregators to collect your configuration and compliance data from the below sources, and aggregate that data into a single account and AWS Region to get a centralized view of your resource inventory and compliance.

1. Multiple accounts and multiple AWS Regions.
2. A single account and multiple AWS Regions.
3. An organization in AWS Organizations and all the accounts in the organization that have AWS Config enabled.

AWS CloudHSM automatically takes a backup of your HSM cluster once a day and whenever an HSM is added to or removed from your cluster. Until today, however, customers were responsible for deleting old backups. Deleting out of date backups is important to prevent inactive users and expired login credentials from being used to access sensitive data on the HSM.  

Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for you to add speech-to-text capabilities to your applications. Today, we are excited to announce native support for Ogg opus and FLAC encoded audio in Amazon Transcribe for streaming transcription. Previously, you were required to transcode audio streams with these encodings to PCM encoding which added extra costs and scaling challenges for large workloads.

You can now ensure that only trusted and verified code is deployed in your AWS Lambda functions. With Code Signing for Lambda, administrators can configure Lambda functions to only accept signed code on deployment. When developers deploy signed code to such functions, Lambda checks the signatures to ensure the code is not altered or tampered. Additionally, Lambda ensures the code is signed by trusted developers before accepting the deployment.

Starting today, EC2 Fleet and Spot Fleet (further referred to as Fleet) are integrated with Amazon EventBridge (formerly CloudWatch Events) to notify you about important Fleet events, state changes, and errors. This allows you to automate actions in response to Fleet state changes as well as monitor the state of your Fleet from a central place without a need to continuously poll Fleet APIs. Amazon EventBridge enables you to collect monitoring data from AWS resources and applications, and allows you to build loosely coupled and distributed event-driven architectures.