Category: Announcements

AWS has been named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) for AWS Connect Customer. This recognition marks an important milestone for our team, and it reflects years of work pushing on what’s possible in customer experience. 

Seekable OCI (SOCI) indexing for Amazon SageMaker AI training and processing jobs takes full container image download off the critical path. SageMaker AI lazy-loads your image to start containers in seconds instead of minutes, with no changes to your job definition. See the benchmarks and how to adopt it.

The Amazon Polly Generative engine gets a major upgrade: more expressive, more accurate speech with low latency, plus 14 new voices across 9 locales and general availability of Hindi and Finnish. This drop-in upgrade requires no code changes and is now generally available in production.

Amazon SageMaker AI serverless model customization now includes training sessions, generally available today. You write and coordinate your own post-training loop (custom loss functions, reward signals, or multi-turn reinforcement learning) while SageMaker AI handles GPU allocation, distributed execution, fault recovery, and checkpoint storage.

Amazon SageMaker AI training session APIs let you write your own LLM training loop (SFT, RL, or custom objectives) in a Python script while the service runs the GPUs. This post introduces the programming model and three SDK clients, then walks through a GRPO loop on GSM8K and a reinforcement learning workload on competitive programming.

Canadian organizations can now access OpenAI GPT-5.6, GPT-6, and GPT-6.1 models on Amazon Bedrock from the Canada (Central) and Canada West (Calgary) Regions using cross-Region inference. This post covers the models and inference profiles, how to set up permissions, and how to invoke them with the Responses, Chat Completions, and Converse APIs.

Amazon Bedrock now supports structured outputs for all Anthropic Claude models on both the bedrock-runtime and bedrock-mantle endpoints. Receive schema-compliant JSON that conforms to a defined structure, without custom parsing, retry logic, or post-processing, using JSON Schema output format and strict tool use.

New Amazon SageMaker AI customers can now land in a fully configured SageMaker Studio environment in only a few steps. Sign up with an identity you already have, such as Amazon, Apple, GitHub, or Google, with no advanced AWS account or credit card required for most customers, plus $100 in AWS Free Tier credits.

Amazon SageMaker JumpStart onboarded over 100 new models from 30 providers in the first three quarters of 2026. This recap covers the model-onboarding highlights and JumpStart enhancements, including the simplified Model Hub, pre-configured deployment options, and Hugging Face deep link integration.

TwelveLabs Pegasus 1.5 is now available in Amazon Bedrock. The video language model turns long-form video into structured, timestamped metadata: define the moments that matter and get every matching segment back as JSON, with new video segmentation, multimodal prompting with reference images, and on-the-fly processing of up to two hours of video.