New for Amazon Connect: Voice ID, Wisdom, and Outbound Communications

During the AWS re:Invent conference last year, I wrote about new capabilities added to Amazon Connect. Today, I am happy to announce the general availability of two of these capabilities, Voice ID and Wisdom, and the launch of a new one. High-volume outbound communications allows, as the name implies, the initiation and management of outbound communications over voice, SMS, or email. Amazon Connect is an easy-to-use omnichannel cloud contact center that helps you provide customer service at a lower cost. In just a few clicks, you can set up and make changes to your contact center, so agents can begin helping customers right away. Amazon Connect Wisdom Wisdom reduces the time agents spend searching for answers. Today, when agents require…

Amazon QuickSight Q – Business Intelligence Using Natural Language Questions

Making sense of business data so that you can get value out of it is worthwhile yet still challenging. Even though the term Business Intelligence (BI) has been around since the mid-1800s (according to Wikipedia) adoption of contemporary BI tools within enterprises is still fairly low. Amazon QuickSight was designed to make it easier for you to put BI to work in your organization. Announced in 2015 and launched in 2016, QuickSight is a scalable BI service built for the cloud. Since that 2016 launch, we have added many new features, including geospatial visualization and private VPC access in 2017, pay-per-session pricing in 2018, additional APIs (data, dashboard, SPICE, and permissions in 2019), embedded authoring of dashboards & support for…

AWS Cloud Builders – Career Transformation & Personal Growth

Long-time readers of this blog know that I firmly believe in the power of education to improve lives. AWS Training and Certification equips people and organizations around the world with cloud computing education to build and validate cloud computing skills. With demand for cloud skills and experience at an all-time high, there’s never been a better time to get started. On the training side you have a multitude of options for classroom and digital training, including offerings from AWS Training Partners. After you have been trained and have gained some experience, you can prepare for, schedule, and earn one or more of the eleven AWS Certifications. I encourage you to spend some time watching our new AWS Cloud Builder Career…

New for AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry – Tracing Support is Now Generally Available

Last year before re:Invent, we introduced the public preview of AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry, a secure distribution of the OpenTelemetry project supported by AWS. OpenTelemetry provides tools, APIs, and SDKs to instrument, generate, collect, and export telemetry data to better understand the behavior and the performance of your applications. Yesterday, upstream OpenTelemetry announced tracing stability milestone for its components. Today, I am happy to share that support for traces is now generally available in AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry. Using OpenTelemetry, you can instrument your applications just once and then send traces to multiple monitoring solutions. You can use AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry to instrument your applications running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS),…