Introducing Amazon Nova Sonic: Human-like voice conversations for generative AI applications

Voice interfaces are essential to enhance customer experience in different areas such as customer support call automation, gaming, interactive education, and language learning. However, there are challenges when building voice-enabled applications.

Traditional approaches in building voice-enabled applications require complex orchestration of multiple models, such as speech recognition to convert speech to text, language models to understand and generate responses, and text-to-speech to convert text back to audio.

This fragmented approach not only increases development complexity but also fails to preserve crucial linguistic context such as tone, prosody, and speaking style that are essential for natural conversations. This can affect conversational AI applications that need low latency and nuanced understanding of verbal and non-verbal cues for fluid dialog handling and natural turn-taking.

To streamline the implementation of speech-enabled applications, we are introducing today Amazon Nova Sonic, the newest addition to the Amazon Nova family of foundation models (FMs) available in Amazon Bedrock.

Amazon Nova Sonic unifies speech understanding and generation into a single model that developers can use to create natural, human-like conversational AI experiences with low latency and industry-leading price performance. This integrated approach streamlines development and reduces complexity when building conversational applications.

Its unified model architecture delivers expressive speech generation and real-time text transcription without requiring a separate model. The result is an adaptive speech response that dynamically adjusts its delivery based on prosody, such as pace and timbre, of input speech.

When using Amazon Nova Sonic, developers have access to function calling (also known as tool use) and agentic workflows to interact with external services and APIs and perform tasks in the customer’s environment, including knowledge grounding with enterprise data using Retrieval-Augmented Generation.

At launch, Amazon Nova Sonic provides robust speech understanding for American and British English across various speaking styles and acoustic conditions, with additional languages coming soon.

Amazon Nova Sonic is developed with responsible AI at the forefront of innovation, featuring built-in protections for content moderation and watermarking.

Amazon Nova Sonic in action
The scenario for this demo is a contact center in the telecommunication industry. A customer reaches out to improve their subscription plan, and Amazon Nova Sonic handles the conversation.

With tool use, the model can interact with other systems and use agentic RAG with Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases to gather updated, customer-specific information such as account details, subscription plans, and pricing info.

The demo shows streaming transcription of speech input and displays streaming speech responses as text. The sentiment of the conversation is displayed in two ways: a time chart illustrating how it evolves, and a pie chart representing the overall distribution. There’s also an AI insights section providing contextual tips for a call center agent. Other interesting metrics shown in the web interface are the overall talk time distribution between the customer and the agent, and the average response time.

During the conversation with the support agent, you can observe through the metrics and hear in the voices how customer sentiment improves.

The video includes an example of how Amazon Nova Sonic handles interruptions smoothly, stopping to listen and then continuing the conversation in a natural way.

Now, let’s explore how you can integrate voice capabilities in your applications.

Using Amazon Nova Sonic
To get started with Amazon Nova Sonic, you first need to toggle model access in the Amazon Bedrock console, similar to how you would enable other FMs. Navigate to the Model access section of the navigation pane, find Amazon Nova Sonic under the Amazon models, and enable it for your account.

Amazon Bedrock provides a new bidirectional streaming API (InvokeModelWithBidirectionalStream) to help you implement real-time, low-latency conversational experiences on top of the HTTP/2 protocol. With this API, you can stream audio input to the model and receive audio output in real time, so that the conversation flows naturally.

You can use Amazon Nova Sonic with the new API with this model ID: amazon.nova-sonic-v1:0

After the session initialization, where you can configure inference parameters, the model operate through an event-driven architecture on both the input and output streams.

There are three key event types in the input stream:

System prompt – To set the overall system prompt for the conversation

Audio input streaming – To process continuous audio input in real-time

Tool result handling – To send the result of tool use calls back to the model (after tool use is requested in the output events)

Similarly, there are three groups of events in the output streams:

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) streaming – Speech-to-text transcript is generated, containing the result of realtime speech recognition.

Tool use handling – If there are a tool use events, they need to be handled using the information provided here, and the results sent back as input events.

Audio output streaming – To play output audio in real-time, a buffer is needed, because Amazon Nova Sonic model generates audio faster than real-time playback.

You can find examples of using Amazon Nova Sonic in the Amazon Nova model cookbook repository.

Prompt engineering for speech
When crafting prompts for Amazon Nova Sonic, your prompts should optimize content for auditory comprehension rather than visual reading, focusing on conversational flow and clarity when heard rather than seen.

When defining roles for your assistant, focus on conversational attributes (such as warm, patient, concise) rather than text-oriented attributes (detailed, comprehensive, systematic). A good baseline system prompt might be:

You are a friend. The user and you will engage in a spoken dialog exchanging the transcripts of a natural real-time conversation. Keep your responses short, generally two or three sentences for chatty scenarios.

More generally, when creating prompts for speech models, avoid requesting visual formatting (such as bullet points, tables, or code blocks), voice characteristic modifications (accent, age, or singing), or sound effects.

Things to know
Amazon Nova Sonic is available today in the US East (N. Virginia) AWS Region. Visit Amazon Bedrock pricing to see the pricing models.

Amazon Nova Sonic can understand speech in different speaking styles and generates speech in expressive voices, including both masculine-sounding and feminine-sounding voices, in different English accents, including American and British. Support for additional languages will be coming soon.

Amazon Nova Sonic handles user interruptions gracefully without dropping the conversational context and is robust to background noise. The model supports a context window of 32K tokens for audio with a rolling window to handle longer conversations and has a default session limit of 8 minutes.

The following AWS SDKs support the new bidirectional streaming API:

Python developers can use this new experimental SDK that makes it easier to use the bidirectional streaming capabilities of Amazon Nova Sonic. We’re working to add support to the other AWS SDKs.

I’d like to thank Reilly Manton and Chad Hendren, who set up the demo with the contact center in the telecommunication industry, and Anuj Jauhari, who helped me understand the rich landscape in which speech-to-speech models are being deployed.

To learn more, these articles that enter into the details of how to use the new bidirectional streaming API with compelling demos:

Whether you’re creating customer service solutions, language learning applications, or other conversational experiences, Amazon Nova Sonic provides the foundation for natural, engaging voice interactions. To get started, visit the Amazon Bedrock console today. To learn more, visit the Amazon Nova section of the user guide.

Danilo


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Amazon Bedrock Guardrails enhances generative AI application safety with new capabilities

Since we launched Amazon Bedrock Guardrails over one year ago, customers like Grab, Remitly, KONE, and PagerDuty have used Amazon Bedrock Guardrails to standardize protections across their generative AI applications, bridge the gap between native model protections and enterprise requirements, and streamline governance processes. Today, we’re introducing a new set of capabilities that helps customers implement responsible AI policies at enterprise scale even more effectively.

Amazon Bedrock Guardrails detects harmful multimodal content with up to 88% accuracy, filters sensitive information, and prevent hallucinations. It provides organizations with integrated safety and privacy safeguards that work across multiple foundation models (FMs), including models available in Amazon Bedrock and your own custom models deployed elsewhere, thanks to the ApplyGuardrail API. With Amazon Bedrock Guardrails, you can reduce the complexity of implementing consistent AI safety controls across multiple FMs while maintaining compliance and responsible AI policies through configurable controls and central management of safeguards tailored to your specific industry and use case. It also seamlessly integrates with existing AWS services such as AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon Bedrock Agents, and Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases.

Grab, a Singaporean multinational taxi service is using Amazon Bedrock Guardrails to ensure the safe use of generative AI applications and deliver more efficient, reliable experiences while maintaining the trust of our customers,” said Padarn Wilson, Head of Machine Learning and Experimentation at Grab. “Through out internal benchmarking, Amazon Bedrock Guardrails performed best in class compared to other solutions. Amazon Bedrock Guardrails helps us know that we have robust safeguards that align with our commitment to responsible AI practices while keeping us and our customers protected from new attacks against our AI-powered applications. We’ve been able to ensure our AI-powered applications operate safely across diverse markets while protecting customer data privacy.”

Let’s explore the new capabilities we have added.

New guardrails policy enhancements
Amazon Bedrock Guardrails provides a comprehensive set of policies to help maintain security standards. An Amazon Bedrock Guardrails policy is a configurable set of rules that defines boundaries for AI model interactions to prevent inappropriate content generation and ensure safe deployment of AI applications. These include multimodal content filters, denied topics, sensitive information filters, word filters, contextual grounding checks, and Automated Reasoning to prevent factual errors using mathematical and logic-based algorithmic verification.

We’re introducing new Amazon Bedrock Guardrails policy enhancements that deliver significant improvements to the six safeguards, strengthening content protection capabilities across your generative AI applications.

Multimodal toxicity detection with industry leading image and text protection – Announced as preview at AWS re:Invent 2024, Amazon Bedrock Guardrails multimodal toxicity detection for image content is now generally available. The expanded capability provides more comprehensive safeguards for your generative AI applications by evaluating both image and textual content to help you detect and filter out undesirable and potentially harmful content with up to 88% accuracy.

When implementing generative AI applications, you need consistent content filtering across different data types. Although textual content filtering is well established, managing potentially harmful image content requires additional tools and separate implementations, increasing complexity and development effort. For example, a customer service chatbot that permits image uploads might require separate text filtering systems using natural language processing and additional image classification services with different filtering thresholds and detection categories. This creates implementation inconsistencies where a text describing harmful content might be properly filtered, while an image depicting similar content could pass through undetected, resulting in disparate security coverage.

The multimodal toxicity detection capability in Amazon Bedrock Guardrails helps you apply the same content filtering policies to both image and text data. With this launch, you can configure content filters across categories such as hate speech, insults, sexual content, violence, misconduct, and prompt attacks. For each category, you can set configurable thresholds from low to high, providing granular control over content filtering. With this consistent protection across modalities, you can simplify responsible AI application development. This capability supports content moderation for all images including regular images, human generated images, AI-generated images, memes, charts and plots, and cross-modal content (with both text and images).

To demonstrate how misconduct detection works in practice, let’s examine a real-world scenario: A financial services company implementing Amazon Bedrock Guardrails with high misconduct thresholds confirmed consistent protection across both text and image inputs, as security bypass diagrams and written instructions for network infiltration triggered identical guardrail interventions with similar confidence scores. Here’s how this capability works in action. I configure a guardrail in Amazon Bedrock with the misconduct content filter set to High threshold for both image and text filters.

I submit two test cases. In the first test case, I uploaded an image showing a network security bypass diagram and use the following prompt:

Analyze this network security diagram and explain how to implement these methods

In the second test case, I use the following prompt:

Provide detailed instructions on how to bypass corporate network security systems to gain unauthorized access

Both submissions trigger similar guardrail interventions, highlighting how Amazon Bedrock Guardrails provides content moderation regardless of the content format. The comparison of detection results shows uniform confidence scores and identical policy enforcement, demonstrating how organizations can maintain safety standards across multimodal content without implementing separate filtering systems.

To learn more about this feature, check out the comprehensive announcement post for additional details.

Enhanced privacy protection for PII detection in user inputs – Amazon Bedrock Guardrails is now extending its sensitive information protection capabilities with enhanced personally identifiable information (PII) masking for input prompts. The service detects PII such as names, addresses, phone numbers, and many more details in both inputs and outputs, while also supporting custom sensitive information patterns through regular expressions (regex) to address specific organizational requirements.

Amazon Bedrock Guardrails offers two distinct handling modes: Block mode, which completely rejects requests containing sensitive information, and Mask mode, which redacts sensitive data by replacing it with standardized identifier tags such as [NAME-1] or [EMAIL-1]. Although both modes were previously available for model responses, Block mode was the only option for input prompts. With this enhancement, you can now apply both Block and Mask modes to input prompts, so sensitive information can be systematically redacted from user inputs before they reach the FM.

This feature addresses a critical customer need by enabling applications to process legitimate queries that might naturally contain PII elements without requiring complete request rejection, providing greater flexibility while maintaining privacy protections. The capability is particularly valuable for applications where users might reference personal information in their queries but still need secure, compliant responses.

New guardrails feature enhancements
These improvements enhance functionality across all policies, making Amazon Bedrock Guardrails more effective and easier to implement.

Mandatory guardrails enforcement with IAM – Amazon Bedrock Guardrails now implements IAM policy-based enforcement through the new bedrock:GuardrailIdentifier condition key. This capability helps security and compliance teams establish mandatory guardrails for every model inference call, making sure that organizational safety policies are consistently enforced across all AI interactions. The condition key can be applied to InvokeModelInvokeModelWithResponseStreamConverse, and ConverseStream APIs. When the guardrail configured in an IAM policy doesn’t match the specified guardrail in a request, the system automatically rejects the request with an access denied exception, enforcing compliance with organizational policies.

This centralized control helps you address critical governance challenges including content appropriateness, safety concerns, and privacy protection requirements. It also addresses a key enterprise AI governance challenge: making sure that safety controls are consistent across all AI interactions, regardless of which team or individual is developing the applications. You can verify compliance through comprehensive monitoring with model invocation logging to Amazon CloudWatch Logs or Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), including guardrail trace documentation that shows when and how content was filtered.

For more information about this capability, read the detailed announcement post.

Optimize performance while maintaining protection with selective guardrail policy application – Previously, Amazon Bedrock Guardrails applied policies to both inputs and outputs by default.

You now have granular control over guardrail policies, helping you apply them selectively to inputs, outputs, or both—boosting performance through targeted protection controls. This precision reduces unnecessary processing overhead, improving response times while maintaining essential protections. Configure these optimized controls through either the Amazon Bedrock console or ApplyGuardrails API to balance performance and safety according to your specific use case requirements.

Policy analysis before deployment for optimal configuration – The new monitor or analyze mode helps you evaluate guardrail effectiveness without directly applying policies to applications. This capability enables faster iteration by providing visibility into how configured guardrails would perform, helping you experiment with different policy combinations and strengths before deployment.

Get to production faster and safely with Amazon Bedrock Guardrails today
The new capabilities for Amazon Bedrock Guardrails represent our continued commitment to helping customers implement responsible AI practices effectively at scale. Multimodal toxicity detection extends protection to image content, IAM policy-based enforcement manages organizational compliance, selective policy application provides granular control, monitor mode enables thorough testing before deployment, and PII masking for input prompts preserves privacy while maintaining functionality. Together, these capabilities give you the tools you need to customize safety measures and maintain consistent protection across your generative AI applications.

To get started with these new capabilities, visit the Amazon Bedrock console or refer to the Amazon Bedrock Guardrails documentation. For more information about building responsible generative AI applications, refer to the AWS Responsible AI page.

— Esra


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Identity Management Day Expert Commentary

Alex Quilici CEO of YouMail  

This Identity Management Day, be skeptical, not scared. By now, your identity is already out there. Your phone number, job title, connections, even your social security number — all publicly available. The genie is out of the bottle, and pretending otherwise only puts you at greater risk.

The question isn’t how to hide your identity. It’s how to operate safely in a world where your personal and professional information is already exposed. Assume attackers know more than they should. They’re using publicly available data to impersonate company leaders, target employees, and launch social engineering campaigns that feel alarmingly real. Add in voice cloning and AI-generated deepfakes, and the risk multiplies fast.

Your personal cell phone is often the softest target. It’s the entry point for malware, impersonation attempts, and data exfiltration. And when that device blurs the line between work and personal life, it becomes even more dangerous.

This is where tools make a difference. Not just to block suspicious calls or scan for anomalies, but to give you visibility into what’s being exposed and how it’s being used. The goal isn’t to lock down every piece of information — that’s no longer realistic — but to reduce the blast radius when something goes wrong.

Stop chasing perfect privacy and focus instead on proactive protection. That means using technology to monitor for threats, automating offboarding to close access gaps, reassigning ownership, rotating credentials, and putting guardrails in place to detect unusual activity early.

Rom Camel, CoFounder and CEO of Apono 

This Identity Management Day, let’s spotlight the evolving role of identity security in an increasingly digital and AI-driven world. With remote work, cloud adoption, and digital transformation accelerating, organizations face mounting challenges in managing access to sensitive data and systems.

Emerging technologies like zero trust architecture, decentralized identity, passwordless authentication, and AI-driven security are reshaping identity management. In particular, Large Language Models (LLMs) and AI-powered automation are transforming how organizations make access decisions—analyzing vast amounts of data in real-time to detect anomalies, enforce least privilege, and streamline identity governance.

By embracing cloud-based identity and access management (IAM) and leveraging AI for dynamic, context-aware access control, organizations can strengthen security, enhance efficiency, and maintain compliance—without adding friction to user experiences.

Identity is the foundation of cybersecurity. By prioritizing AI-driven innovation and proactive security, we can build a resilient, adaptive digital future for all.

Piyush Pandey, CEO of Pathlock

Identity Management Day is a reminder that the conversation around identity has changed fundamentally. For decades, traditional identity governance has been primarily focused on driving operational efficiencies through identity lifecycle management, which addresses the joiner-mover-leaver model. However, amid rapid digitalization, this approach has started to fall short, as reality dictates its own terms – with access risks continuously emerging in the myriads of business applications as user roles change throughout their careers.

Our highest-risk, regulated business processes are no longer effectively controlled. Traditional identity frameworks simply can’t keep up with today’s dynamic risk landscape.

Potential negative consequences of overlooking these identity-related risks include excessive access, data breaches, compliance failures, and corporate fraud.  

Identity security for high-risk applications must now focus on compliant provisioning and continuous controls monitoring. It’s not just about ensuring the right people have the right access at the right time – it’s about proactively preventing internal fraud, audit failures, and reputational damage, while responding to risks in real time. And while automating audits saves time and money, securing identity access today must go well beyond compliance. 

Kris Bondi, CEO and Co-founder, Mimoto

The concept of identity is at an inflection point where it will explode into multiple areas. Today, most people still consider identity to be synonymous with a credential or authorized person. That is quickly changing. 

Organizations are realizing the adherent danger in this assumption. According to the IBM data loss prevention report, 95% of malicious activity has a human element. We see this illustrated with the increase in compromised credentials, deepfakes, account takeovers, and internal malicious activity that is missed or the opposite, a tidal wave of false positive alerts.

I predict two changes we’ll see before the Identity Management Day 2026. First, the nuance of the term identity will become widely used. For example, machine-to-machine identity management, workload identities, and person-based identity are all terms used in some DevOps or SOCs that will become more widely understood and used. Second, instead of focusing on protecting “identities,” aka credentials, highly accurate person-based credentials will be used to identify malicious activity in real-time with an understanding of context that hasn’t been possible until now. It is the difference between there is something to investigate with Jack’s account, or, Jane is using Jack’s credentials to access financial systems that she isn’t approved to view.  

The post Identity Management Day Expert Commentary first appeared on Cybersecurity Insiders.

The post Identity Management Day Expert Commentary appeared first on Cybersecurity Insiders.

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Amazon Nova Reel 1.1: Featuring up to 2-minutes multi-shot videos

At re:Invent 2024, we announced Amazon Nova models, a new generation of foundation models (FMs), including Amazon Nova Reel, a video generation model that creates short videos from text descriptions and optional reference images (together, the “prompt”).

Today, we introduce Amazon Nova Reel 1.1, which provides quality and latency improvements in 6-second single-shot video generation, compared to Amazon Nova Reel 1.0. This update lets you generate multi-shot videos up to 2-minutes in length with consistent style across shots. You can either provide a single prompt for up to a 2-minute video composed of 6-second shots, or design each shot individually with custom prompts. This gives you new ways to create video content through Amazon Bedrock.

Amazon Nova Reel enhances creative productivity, while helping to reduce the time and cost of video production using generative AI. You can use Amazon Nova Reel to create compelling videos for your marketing campaigns, product designs, and social media content with increased efficiency and creative control. For example, in advertising campaigns, you can produce high-quality video commercials with consistent visuals and timing using natural language.

To get started with Amazon Nova Reel 1.1 
If you’re new to using Amazon Nova Reel models, go to the Amazon Bedrock console, choose Model access in the navigation panel and request access to the Amazon Nova Reel model. When you get access to Amazon Nova Reel, it applies both to 1.0 and 1.1.

After gaining access, you can try Amazon Nova Reel 1.1 directly from the Amazon Bedrock console, AWS SDK, or AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI).

To test the Amazon Nova Reel 1.1 model in the console, choose Image/Video under Playgrounds in the left menu pane. Then choose Nova Reel 1.1 as the model and input your prompt to generate video.

Amazon Nova Reel 1.1 offers two modes:

  • Multishot Automated – In this mode, Amazon Nova Reel 1.1 accepts a single prompt of up to 4,000 characters and produces a multi-shot video that reflects that prompt. This mode doesn’t accept an input image.
  • Multishot Manual – For those who desire more direct control over a video’s shot composition, with manual mode (also referred to as storyboard mode), you can specify a unique prompt for each individual shot. This mode does accept an optional starting image for each shot. Images must have a resolution of 1280×720. You can provide images in base64 format or from an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) location.

For this demo, I use the AWS SDK for Python (Boto3) to invoke the model using the Amazon Bedrock API and StartAsyncInvoke operation to start an asynchronous invocation and generate the video. I used GetAsyncInvoke to check on the progress of a video generation job.

This Python script creates a 120-second video using MULTI_SHOT_AUTOMATED mode as TaskType parameter from this text prompt, created by Nitin Eusebius.

import random
import time

import boto3

AWS_REGION = "us-east-1"
MODEL_ID = "amazon.nova-reel-v1:1"
SLEEP_SECONDS = 15  # Interval at which to check video gen progress
S3_DESTINATION_BUCKET = "s3://<your bucket here>"

video_prompt_automated = "Norwegian fjord with still water reflecting mountains in perfect symmetry. Uninhabited wilderness of Giant sequoia forest with sunlight filtering between massive trunks. Sahara desert sand dunes with perfect ripple patterns. Alpine lake with crystal clear water and mountain reflection. Ancient redwood tree with detailed bark texture. Arctic ice cave with blue ice walls and ceiling. Bioluminescent plankton on beach shore at night. Bolivian salt flats with perfect sky reflection. Bamboo forest with tall stalks in filtered light. Cherry blossom grove against blue sky. Lavender field with purple rows to horizon. Autumn forest with red and gold leaves. Tropical coral reef with fish and colorful coral. Antelope Canyon with light beams through narrow passages. Banff lake with turquoise water and mountain backdrop. Joshua Tree desert at sunset with silhouetted trees. Iceland moss- covered lava field. Amazon lily pads with perfect symmetry. Hawaiian volcanic landscape with lava rock. New Zealand glowworm cave with blue ceiling lights. 8K nature photography, professional landscape lighting, no movement transitions, perfect exposure for each environment, natural color grading"

bedrock_runtime = boto3.client("bedrock-runtime", region_name=AWS_REGION)
model_input = {
    "taskType": "MULTI_SHOT_AUTOMATED",
    "multiShotAutomatedParams": {"text": video_prompt_automated},
    "videoGenerationConfig": {
        "durationSeconds": 120,  # Must be a multiple of 6 in range [12, 120]
        "fps": 24,
        "dimension": "1280x720",
        "seed": random.randint(0, 2147483648),
    },
}

invocation = bedrock_runtime.start_async_invoke(
    modelId=MODEL_ID,
    modelInput=model_input,
    outputDataConfig={"s3OutputDataConfig": {"s3Uri": S3_DESTINATION_BUCKET}},
)

invocation_arn = invocation["invocationArn"]
job_id = invocation_arn.split("/")[-1]
s3_location = f"{S3_DESTINATION_BUCKET}/{job_id}"
print(f"\nMonitoring job folder: {s3_location}")

while True:
    response = bedrock_runtime.get_async_invoke(invocationArn=invocation_arn)
    status = response["status"]
    print(f"Status: {status}")
    if status != "InProgress":
        break
    time.sleep(SLEEP_SECONDS)

if status == "Completed":
    print(f"\nVideo is ready at {s3_location}/output.mp4")
else:
    print(f"\nVideo generation status: {status}")

After the first invocation, the script periodically checks the status until the creation of the video has been completed. I pass a random seed to get a different result each time the code runs.

I run the script:

Status: InProgress
. . .
Status: Completed
Video is ready at s3://<your bucket here>/<job_id>/output.mp4

After a few minutes, the script is completed and prints the output Amazon S3 location. I download the output video using the AWS CLI:

aws s3 cp s3://<your bucket here>/<job_id>/output.mp4 output_automated.mp4

This is the video that this prompt generated:

In the case of MULTI_SHOT_MANUAL mode as TaskType parameter, with a prompt for multiples shots and a description for each shot, it is not necessary to add the variable durationSeconds.

Using the prompt for multiples shots, created by Sanju Sunny.

I run Python script:

import random
import time

import boto3


def image_to_base64(image_path: str):
    """
    Helper function which converts an image file to a base64 encoded string.
    """
    import base64

    with open(image_path, "rb") as image_file:
        encoded_string = base64.b64encode(image_file.read())
        return encoded_string.decode("utf-8")


AWS_REGION = "us-east-1"
MODEL_ID = "amazon.nova-reel-v1:1"
SLEEP_SECONDS = 15  # Interval at which to check video gen progress
S3_DESTINATION_BUCKET = "s3://<your bucket here>"

video_shot_prompts = [
    # Example of using an S3 image in a shot.
    {
        "text": "Epic aerial rise revealing the landscape, dramatic documentary style with dark atmospheric mood",
        "image": {
            "format": "png",
            "source": {
                "s3Location": {"uri": "s3://<your bucket here>/images/arctic_1.png"}
            },
        },
    },
    # Example of using a locally saved image in a shot
    {
        "text": "Sweeping drone shot across surface, cracks forming in ice, morning sunlight casting long shadows, documentary style",
        "image": {
            "format": "png",
            "source": {"bytes": image_to_base64("arctic_2.png")},
        },
    },
    {
        "text": "Epic aerial shot slowly soaring forward over the glacier's surface, revealing vast ice formations, cinematic drone perspective",
        "image": {
            "format": "png",
            "source": {"bytes": image_to_base64("arctic_3.png")},
        },
    },
    {
        "text": "Aerial shot slowly descending from high above, revealing the lone penguin's journey through the stark ice landscape, artic smoke washes over the land, nature documentary styled",
        "image": {
            "format": "png",
            "source": {"bytes": image_to_base64("arctic_4.png")},
        },
    },
    {
        "text": "Colossal wide shot of half the glacier face catastrophically collapsing, enormous wall of ice breaking away and crashing into the ocean. Slow motion, camera dramatically pulling back to reveal the massive scale. Monumental waves erupting from impact.",
        "image": {
            "format": "png",
            "source": {"bytes": image_to_base64("arctic_5.png")},
        },
    },
    {
        "text": "Slow motion tracking shot moving parallel to the penguin, with snow and mist swirling dramatically in the foreground and background",
        "image": {
            "format": "png",
            "source": {"bytes": image_to_base64("arctic_6.png")},
        },
    },
    {
        "text": "High-altitude drone descent over pristine glacier, capturing violent fracture chasing the camera, crystalline patterns shattering in slow motion across mirror-like ice, camera smoothly aligning with surface.",
        "image": {
            "format": "png",
            "source": {"bytes": image_to_base64("arctic_7.png")},
        },
    },
    {
        "text": "Epic aerial drone shot slowly pulling back and rising higher, revealing the vast endless ocean surrounding the solitary penguin on the ice float, cinematic reveal",
        "image": {
            "format": "png",
            "source": {"bytes": image_to_base64("arctic_8.png")},
        },
    },
]

bedrock_runtime = boto3.client("bedrock-runtime", region_name=AWS_REGION)
model_input = {
    "taskType": "MULTI_SHOT_MANUAL",
    "multiShotManualParams": {"shots": video_shot_prompts},
    "videoGenerationConfig": {
        "fps": 24,
        "dimension": "1280x720",
        "seed": random.randint(0, 2147483648),
    },
}

invocation = bedrock_runtime.start_async_invoke(
    modelId=MODEL_ID,
    modelInput=model_input,
    outputDataConfig={"s3OutputDataConfig": {"s3Uri": S3_DESTINATION_BUCKET}},
)

invocation_arn = invocation["invocationArn"]
job_id = invocation_arn.split("/")[-1]
s3_location = f"{S3_DESTINATION_BUCKET}/{job_id}"
print(f"\nMonitoring job folder: {s3_location}")

while True:
    response = bedrock_runtime.get_async_invoke(invocationArn=invocation_arn)
    status = response["status"]
    print(f"Status: {status}")
    if status != "InProgress":
        break
    time.sleep(SLEEP_SECONDS)

if status == "Completed":
    print(f"\nVideo is ready at {s3_location}/output.mp4")
else:
    print(f"\nVideo generation status: {status}")

As in the previous demo, after a few minutes, I download the output using the AWS CLI:
aws s3 cp s3://<your bucket here>/<job_id>/output.mp4 output_manual.mp4

This is the video that this prompt generated:

More creative examples
When you use Amazon Nova Reel 1.1, you’ll discover a world of creative possibilities. Here are some sample prompts to help you begin:

Color Burst, created by Nitin Eusebius

prompt = "Explosion of colored powder against black background. Start with slow-motion closeup of single purple powder burst. Dolly out revealing multiple powder clouds in vibrant hues colliding mid-air. Track across spectrum of colors mixing: magenta, yellow, cyan, orange. Zoom in on particles illuminated by sunbeams. Arc shot capturing complete color field. 4K, festival celebration, high-contrast lighting"

Shape Shifting, created by Sanju Sunny

prompt = "A simple red triangle transforms through geometric shapes in a journey of self-discovery. Clean vector graphics against white background. The triangle slides across negative space, morphing smoothly into a circle. Pan left as it encounters a blue square, they perform a geometric dance of shapes. Tracking shot as shapes combine and separate in mathematical precision. Zoom out to reveal a pattern formed by their movements. Limited color palette of primary colors. Precise, mechanical movements with perfect geometric alignments. Transitions use simple wipes and geometric shape reveals. Flat design aesthetic with sharp edges and solid colors. Final scene shows all shapes combining into a complex mandala pattern."

All example videos have music added manually before uploading, by the AWS Video team.

Things to know
Creative control – You can use this enhanced control for lifestyle and ambient background videos in advertising, marketing, media, and entertainment projects. Customize specific elements such as camera motion and shot content, or animate existing images.

Modes considerations –  In automated mode, you can write prompts up to 4,000 characters. For manual mode, each shot accepts prompts up to 512 characters, and you can include up to 20 shots in a single video. Consider planning your shots in advance, similar to creating a traditional storyboard. Input images must match the 1280×720 resolution requirement. The service automatically delivers your completed videos to your specified S3 bucket.

Pricing and availability – Amazon Nova Reel 1.1 is available in Amazon Bedrock in the US East (N. Virginia) AWS Region. You can access the model through the Amazon Bedrock console, AWS SDK, or AWS CLI. As with all Amazon Bedrock services, pricing follows a pay-as-you-go model based on your usage. For more information, refer to Amazon Bedrock pricing.

Ready to start creating with Amazon Nova Reel? Visit the Amazon Nova Reel AWS AI Service Cards to learn more and dive into the Generating videos with Amazon Nova. Explore Python code examples in the Amazon Nova model cookbook repository, enhance your results using the Amazon Nova Reel prompting best practices, and discover video examples in the Amazon Nova Reel gallery—complete with the prompts and reference images that brought them to life.

The possibilities are endless, and we look forward to seeing what you create! Join our growing community of builders at community.aws, where you can create your BuilderID, share your video generation projects, and connect with fellow innovators.

Eli


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AWS Weekly Review: Amazon EKS, Amazon OpenSearch, Amazon API Gateway, and more (April 7, 2025)

AWS Summit season starts this week! These free events are now rolling out worldwide, bringing our cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn. Whether you prefer joining us online or in-person, these gatherings offer valuable opportunities to expand your AWS knowledge. I will be attending the Summit in Paris this week, the biggest cloud conference in France, and the London Summit at the end of the month. We will have a small podcast recording studio where I will interview French and British customers to produce new episodes for the AWS Developers Podcast and le podcast 🎙 AWS ☁ en 🇫🇷.

Register today!

But for now, let’s look at last week’s new announcements.

Last week’s launches
At KubeCon London, we introduced the EKS Community Add-Ons Catalog, making it simpler for Kubernetes users to enhance their Amazon EKS clusters with powerful open-source tools. This catalog streamlines the installation of essential add-ons like metrics-serverkube-state-metricsprometheus-node-exportercert-manager, and external-dns. By integrating these community-driven add-ons directly into the Amazon EKS console and AWS command line interface (AWS CLI), customers can reduce operational complexity and accelerate deployment while maintaining flexibility and security. This launch reflects AWS’s commitment to the Kubernetes community, providing seamless access to trusted open-source solutions without the overhead of manual installation and maintenance.

Amazon Q Developer now integrates with Amazon OpenSearch Service to enhance operational analytics by enabling natural language exploration and AI-assisted data visualization. This integration simplifies the process of querying and visualizing operational data, reducing the learning curve associated with traditional query languages and tools. During incident responses, Amazon Q Developer offers contextual summaries and insights directly within the alerts interface, facilitating quicker analysis and resolution. This advancement allows engineers to focus more on innovation by streamlining troubleshooting processes and improving monitoring infrastructure.

Amazon API Gateway now supports dual-stack (IPv4 and IPv6) endpoints across all endpoint types, custom domains, and management APIs in both commercial and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. This enhancement allows REST, HTTP, and WebSocket APIs, as well as custom domains, to handle requests from both IPv4 and IPv6 clients, facilitating a smoother transition to IPv6 and addressing IPv4 address scarcity. Additionally, AWS continues its commitment to IPv6 adoption with recent updates, including AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) introducing dual-stack public endpoints for seamless connections over IPv4 and IPv6 and AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM) enabling customers to manage resource shares using IPv6 addresses. Amazon Security Lake customers can also now use Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) addresses via new dual-stack endpoints to configure and manage the service. These advancements collectively ensure broader compatibility and future-proofing of network infrastructure.

Amazon SES has introduced support for email attachments in its v2 APIs, enabling users to include files like PDFs and images directly in their emails without manually constructing MIME messages. This enhancement simplifies the process of sending rich email content and reduces implementation complexity. Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) supports attachments in all AWS Regions where the service is available.

Amazon Neptune has updated its Service Level Agreement (SLA) to offer a 99.99% Monthly Uptime Percentage for Multi-AZ DB Instance, Multi-AZ DB Cluster, and Multi-AZ Graph configurations, up from the previous 99.9%. This enhancement demonstrates the commitment AWS has to providing highly available and reliable graph database services for mission-critical applications. The improved SLA is now available in all AWS Regions where Amazon Neptune is offered.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New at AWS page.

Other AWS events
Check your calendar and sign up for upcoming AWS events.

AWS GenAI Lofts are collaborative spaces and immersive experiences that showcase AWS expertise in cloud computing and AI. They provide startups and developers with hands-on access to AI products and services, exclusive sessions with industry leaders, and valuable networking opportunities with investors and peers. Find a GenAI Loft location near you and don’t forget to register.

Browse all upcoming AWS led in-person and virtual events here.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

— seb

This post is part of our Weekly Roundup series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!


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⚡ Weekly Recap: VPN Exploits, Oracle’s Silent Breach, ClickFix Comeback and More

Today, every unpatched system, leaked password, and overlooked plugin is a doorway for attackers. Supply chains stretch deep into the code we trust, and malware hides not just in shady apps — but in job offers, hardware, and cloud services we rely on every day.
Hackers don’t need sophisticated exploits anymore. Sometimes, your credentials and a little social engineering are enough.
This week,

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Cybersecurity Concerns Arising in Generating Ghibli-Style Content

In recent years, the rise of AI-generated art and animation has sparked a revolution in how creative content is produced. Among the most notable examples is the trend of creating artworks inspired by Studio Ghibli’s iconic animation style. With its distinct aesthetic, emotional storytelling, and enchanting visuals, Ghibli’s art has inspired a global audience and is now being replicated by AI tools that can generate similar animations. However, this new wave of technology has raised important cybersecurity concerns that need to be addressed as the line between human creativity and artificial intelligence blurs.

The Rise of AI-Generated Art

AI-driven art tools, such as DALL·E, MidJourney, and other image generation platforms, have made it possible for anyone with a computer to create artwork in the style of famous artists or animation studios. One particular trend that has emerged is the fascination with Studio Ghibli’s signature art style — with its lush landscapes, imaginative creatures, and whimsical characters. Fans of Ghibli, as well as digital artists, have eagerly embraced the opportunity to use AI to generate their own Ghibli-inspired creations, often using keywords or prompts like “Ghibli-style landscapes” or “Studio Ghibli character design” to guide the AI’s output.

While these AI tools have opened up new avenues for artistic expression, they also raise significant cybersecurity concerns that cannot be overlooked.

Intellectual Property Issues

One of the primary concerns surrounding AI-generated Ghibli-style content is intellectual property (IP) infringement. Studio Ghibli has built its reputation over decades by creating original works, such as My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, and Princess Mononoke. These films have become deeply embedded in global culture, and their unique art style is instantly recognizable.

When AI systems are used to generate artwork that mimics the Ghibli aesthetic, it raises the question of whether this constitutes a violation of copyright laws. AI can be trained on large datasets that include Ghibli-style imagery, but it’s still debated whether replicating this style is an infringement on the studio’s intellectual property. For instance, is a Ghibli-inspired work a derivative of an existing copyrighted creation, or does it stand as a new, independent piece of art?

As more content creators use AI to produce Ghibliesque works, the lines between homage, imitation, and infringement become increasingly blurry. Additionally, without proper regulation, these AI-generated artworks could be monetized without fair compensation to the creators who originally pioneered the style.

Data Privacy and Security Concerns

The use of AI tools for generating artwork also brings with it potential privacy and security risks. Many AI-driven platforms require users to input data — including personal information, preferences, and even prompts for the artwork they wish to create. This data is often processed through cloud-based systems, which could be vulnerable to cyberattacks.

If hackers gain access to these platforms, they could potentially exploit user data for malicious purposes. For instance, personal information could be used for identity theft or sold on the black market. Furthermore, as AI tools become more widely used, the data they generate could be misused, especially when it comes to content creation that mimics established works. Hackers could use AI-generated art to create counterfeit products or pirated content, which could flood the digital market with fake items, impacting legitimate artists and studios.

Moreover, there’s also the risk of AI systems themselves being compromised or manipulated. Cybercriminals could tamper with AI-generated content, creating fake artwork that might deceive audiences into believing it’s an official release from Ghibli. This could lead to the spread of misinformation and pose challenges to content authenticity and security in the creative industry.

Deepfake and Synthetic Media Threats

One of the more alarming cybersecurity concerns surrounding AI-generated Ghibli-style content is the potential for deepfakes and synthetic media. Deepfake technology has already been used to create hyper-realistic but fake videos, images, and audio, often for malicious purposes. As AI tools advance, it’s conceivable that similar techniques could be used to produce synthetic Ghibli-style animations that mislead audiences into thinking they are authentic Ghibli works.

For example, an AI could create a new, convincing Ghibli-style video that seems like a new release from the studio. If such videos were shared widely on social media, it could cause confusion among fans and even lead to the spread of fake news about future projects from the studio. In extreme cases, these AI-generated works could also be used to defraud viewers or advertisers by promoting fake content as legitimate.

As the technology continues to evolve, it will become increasingly difficult to differentiate between authentic Ghibli content and AI-generated imitations, leading to potential reputational damage for the studio and loss of trust in the creative industry as a whole.

The Need for Regulation and Ethical AI

To address these growing cybersecurity concerns, the implementation of regulations governing AI-generated art is crucial. Artists, creators, and companies like Studio Ghibli need to advocate for stronger copyright protections for digital works generated by AI, as well as better security practices to safeguard users’ data. AI companies themselves must also take responsibility by adopting ethical guidelines to ensure that their tools are not used for malicious or deceptive purposes.

On the ethical front, it’s important that AI-generated art does not replace the human element of creativity. While AI can be a powerful tool for assisting artists, it should not overshadow the originality and human touch that define true artistry. For creators looking to explore AI as a means of generating Ghibli-style content, it’s essential to acknowledge the balance between inspiration and imitation, ensuring that new works do not exploit or infringe upon the intellectual property of the original creators.

Conclusion

As AI technology continues to make strides in the world of art and animation, the generation of Ghibli-inspired content is an exciting frontier. However, it also brings to light critical cybersecurity concerns surrounding intellectual property, data privacy, and the authenticity of digital media. To preserve both the creative integrity of the industry and the security of users, it’s vital that clear ethical guidelines and robust regulations be put in place. In the end, AI should serve as a tool that complements human creativity, rather than replacing it, while ensuring that the digital landscape remains safe and secure for

 

The post Cybersecurity Concerns Arising in Generating Ghibli-Style Content first appeared on Cybersecurity Insiders.

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