Category: AWS

We are launching three new voices for Polly. Powered by a new long-form engine, the voices are natural and expressive, with appropriate pauses, emphasis, and tone. New Voices The new long-form voices are perfect for blog posts, news articles, training videos, and marketing content. The underlying Machine Learning model extracts meaning from the text, learning about speech segments, prosody (the pattern of rhythm and pauses), intonation, and other aspects of expressive speech, allowing the synthesized audio to express emotions, especially in dialogs. The new long-form engine uses a deep learning text-to-speech (TTS) model trained to acquire a contextual understanding of the text that allows it to express prosody in an appropriate way. This allows the intention of the story to…

If you are ready to learn more about Generative AI while having fun and building cool stuff, check out PartyRock.aws . You can experiment, learn all about prompt engineering, build mini-apps, and share them with your friends — all without writing any code or creating an AWS account. You can also start with an app that has been shared with you and remix it to further enhance and customize it. Using PartyRock To get started, I visit https://partyrock.aws/ , click Sign in, and log in using my Apple, Amazon, or Google account: After authenticating, I am on the front page of PartyRock. I can review some sample apps, or I can click Build your own app to get started: I…

You can now lock individual Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) snapshots in order to enforce better compliance with your data retention policies. Locked snapshots cannot be deleted until the lock is expired or released, giving you the power to keep critical backups safe from accidental or malicious deletion, including ransomware attacks. The Need for Locking AWS customers use EBS snapshots for backups, disaster recovery, data migration, and compliance. Customers in financial services and health care often need to meet specific compliance requirements, with prescribed time frames for retention, and also need to ensure that the snapshots are truly Write Once Read Many (WORM). In order to meet these requirements, customers have implemented solutions that use multiple AWS accounts with…