Alexa for Business now lets IT administrators monitor when shared devices are deregistered from the Alexa for Business account. Shared devices are placed in common areas, such as conference rooms and building lobbies, and are managed centrally with the Alexa for Business console. By knowing when shared devices are deregistered, you can take corrective action and delete the deregistered devices from the console.  

CEO Berlien says Osram is “accelerating” its cost-cutting as it eyes long-term growth in high-tech and a shift in strategic development.

Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for you to add speech-to-text capability to your applications. Amazon Transcribe now supports a feature called Channel Identification that processes audio featuring multiple channels, and produces a single transcript of the speech annotated by the channel on which it was spoken.

Customers can now use AWS Key Management Service (KMS) to manage encryption of data stored in the cloud by AWS Storage Gateway.  AWS KMS is a managed service that makes it easy for you to create and control encryption keys used to encrypt your data. Storage Gateway now supports AWS KMS for encryption of data stored in AWS by all gateway types. This includes virtual tapes managed by Tape Gateway, in-cloud volumes and EBS Snapshots created by Volume Gateway, and files stored as objects in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) by File Gateway. 

AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) Private Certificate Authority (CA) is now available in the EU (London) Region, increasing the number of AWS Regions where ACM Private CA is available to ten. The expansion into a new AWS Region provides you more options to provision your ACM Private CA with the other AWS services you use.

Amazon Polly is an AWS service that turns text into lifelike speech. We’re excited to announce new Hindi language support and the release of our first bilingual voice. Aditi is a female voice that speaks Hindi and Indian English fluently.

At AWS re:Invent 2017, we announced AWS IoT Device Defender, a fully managed service that helps you secure your fleet of IoT devices. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of AWS IoT Device Defender. You can use AWS IoT Device Defender to adhere to recommended security best practices, to continuously monitor device behavior, and to receive alerts so you know when to investigate and mitigate security issues.

You can now use Apache Flink 1.5.0 and Apache Livy 0.5.0 on Amazon EMR release 5.16.0. Flink 1.5.0 has several new features, including a new deployment model that supports dynamic resource allocation on YARN for efficient resource utilization, support for a broadcast state that allows replication of configuration rules and patterns to all parallel instances of a function, a new SQL CLI client to run ad-hoc queries on data streams, ability to store state information on local disks for faster and efficient failure recovery, and other performance and throughput updates for streaming jobs. Livy 0.5.0 brings in support for SparkSQL interpreter for running interactive SQL queries, ability to use multiple languages and share the SparkContext in a single session, ability to share variables across jobs, and other improvements. Additionally, you can now use the upgraded version of Apache Hadoop 2.8.4, Apache Spark 2.3.1, Presto 0.203, Apache Phoenix 4.14.0 and Apache MXNet 1.2.0.

You can create an Amazon EMR cluster with the release 5.16.0 by choosing the release label “emr-5.16.0” from the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or SDK. You can choose Flink, Livy, Hadoop, Spark, Presto, Phoenix, and MXNet to install these applications when you launch your EMR cluster. Please visit the Amazon EMR documentation for more information about the EMR release 5.16.0 , Flink 1.5.0 , Livy 0.5.0 , Spark 2.3.1 , Presto 0.203 , Hadoop 2.8.4 , Phoenix 4.14.0 , and MXNet 1.2.0

Amazon EMR release 5.16.0 is now available in all supported regions for Amazon EMR .

We are announcing two new Amazon Kinesis Data Streams features that boost the performance of your Kinesis Data Streams applications: a new HTTP/2 data retrieval API and enhanced fan-out.

Interested parties can comment on the second draft of the DLC’s horticultural lighting testing and reporting requirements documents that will ultimately lead to a QPL.