Amazon Connect now enables customers to interrupt Amazon Lex Chatbots

By Dustin Ward

Starting today, customers can interrupt a Lex chatbot in mid-sentence to quickly provide a voice input without waiting for it to finish speaking. Amazon Lex chatbots can be used in Amazon Connect flows to provide conversational interactions using the same machine learning technologies like Alexa, enabling companies to offer automated self-service to their customers using…

Custom dictionary files now supported on Amazon Elasticsearch Service

By Dustin Ward

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now offers support for adding custom dictionary files to your domains. Now you can specify synonyms, stop words, and segmentation files to improve your indexing, matching, and search relevancy. Previously, you could only include these types of customizations directly in your mapping which could make them unwieldy and difficult to manage.  …

AWS Cost Explorer Rightsizing Recommendations Integrates with AWS Compute Optimizer

By Dustin Ward

We are excited to announce that customers can now receive EC2 rightsizing recommendations powered by the AWS Compute Optimizer in AWS Cost Explorer. With today’s launch, Cost Explorer customers can get Amazon EC2 rightsizing recommendations across EC2 instance families, in addition to existing support for recommendations within the same EC2 instance family. The same launch…

“We Need COBOL Programmers!” No, You Probably Don’t

By Dustin Ward

Editor’s note: While this topic isn’t entirely security-specific, Trend Micro leader William Malik, has career expertise on the trending topic and shared his perspective. —— There was a provocative report recently that the Governor of New Jersey told reporters that the state of New Jersey needed COBOL programmers. The reason was that the number of…