Amazon has updated its Nova model series, with Nova Reel 1.1 now able to generate AI videos of up to two minutes as well as gaining a new ‘multi-shot’ feature. Announced in December, Nova Reel marked Amazon’s initial foray into generative video. AWS developer advocate Elizabeth Fuentes says that Nova Reel accommodates user prompts of up to 4,000 characters that can generate a series of six-second shots for a sequence totaling two minutes. The company also introduced the Nova Sonic real-time voice model that supports third-party enterprise development.

Nova Reel’s multi-shot feature results in videos that demonstrate “consistent style” across takes, Fuentes adds in a blog post, explaining users 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.”

Nova Reel 1.1 also adds a mode called “Multishot Manual” that can utilize a reference image along with text prompts “to offer more control over a video shot’s composition,” TechCrunch reports, explaining that “given a 1280×720-resolution image and 512-maximum-character prompt, Multishot Manual can generate videos containing up to 20 shots.”

The two minutes of contiguous video output doubles Nova Reel’s capability when it was unveiled at re:Invent.  The video app is available exclusively through AWS, including its Bedrock AI development platform. TechCrunch says “customers must request access.”

Amazon’s new Nova Sonic foundation model “understands not just what you say — but how you say it,” the company explains in a news post, noting it “picks up on tone, inflection, and pacing, for a deeper understanding of human conversation.”

Nova Sonic is “designed to allow third-party app developers to build real-time, naturalistic, conversational voice interactivity to their products using Amazon’s web platform Bedrock,” writes VentureBeat. “Alexa will have to make space for a new Amazon voice AI sibling,” one that in February “got a big intelligence upgrade thanks in part to Amazon Nova and Amazon’s investment Anthropic.”

Compared to the Alexa+ personal voice assistant, Nova Sonic could be referred to as the AWS enterprise voice assistant. Available in Amazon Bedrock via a new bi-directional streaming API, Nova Sonic “simplifies the development of voice applications, such as customer service call automation and AI agents across a broad range of industries, including travel, education, healthcare, entertainment, and more,” Amazon says in a press release.

A Nova Sonic blog post adds gaming to its use cases.

Built as a turnkey audio tool, Nova Sonic also outputs real-time voice transcription. At launch, it provides speech understanding “for American and British English across various speaking styles and acoustic conditions, with additional languages coming soon,” Amazon says.