AWS releases Nova 2.5 Sonic for real-time voice agents

AWS announced general availability of Nova 2.5 Sonic on Amazon Bedrock, saying the speech-to-speech model improves reasoning, instruction following and tool-calling accuracy while lowering latency. The model lets voice agents use connected tools during conversations, including looking up orders, checking return eligibility and initiating returns. It retains a 256K context window, voices in seven languages and support for voice and text in the same session. Availability covers Northern Virginia, Oregon, Stockholm and Tokyo, at the same pricing as Nova 2 Sonic. AWS also made Strands Bidi Agents generally available for building voice agents with longer conversations and connections to other agents.