Episode 40: New AI Voices and other news

This episode of ACP recaps a busy July of Amazon Connect Customer updates.

The headline is a major quality upgrade to Amazon Connect’s AI voices (announced July 20), adding 100 new voice options across 50+ languages, improved turn-taking and interruption handling, fewer gaps, and more control over speed, volume, emotion, and SSML-like markup (including optional laughter 😂). 

We play before/after demos in US English plus Australian and UK variants, noting increased naturalness but limited regional UK accents. 

Additional releases include new supervisor dashboard metrics for agent queues, automatic example evaluations to support agent coaching, workforce planning/forecasting expanded to emails and tasks, a new “interrupt agent” flow block to force routing to specific agents even when unavailable, and rule-based redaction that blurs specified apps or web pages in agent screen recordings to reduce PII exposure.

The episode also reiterates AWS’s April rebrand splitting Amazon Connect into four products under an agentic AI banner.

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