Ahdoot Wolfson attorneys are investigating a potential class action lawsuit against ASAPP, Inc. for their potential violation of California data privacy laws.

In-depth Amazon coverage from the tech giant’s hometown, including e-commerce, AWS, Amazon Prime, Alexa, logistics, devices, and more.Amazon CEO Andy Jassy teased ahead to today’s announcement when he unveiled Amazon’s Nova initiative in December at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)What happens when the AI senses the frustration or joy in your voice?A new speech-to-speech AI model from Amazon, called Nova Sonic, unifies speech recognition and generation to deliver more natural voice interactions — part of the Seattle tech giant’s broader effort to develop human-like intelligence in competition with Google, OpenAI, and others.Among other advances, Amazon says Nova Sonic picks up on tone of voice, adapting to the style and emotions of users. An angry customer on a support call might hear a calm, steady voice in return, while someone sounding excited could get a more upbeat response.“I think of intelligence as inseparable from context,” said Rohit Prasad, Amazon’s senior vice president of artificial general intelligence, who leads a central team working on the company’s most advanced AI technology.“If you’re excited about Hawaii, it will be excited about it,” he explained, as an example. “If you’re not, then it will suggest a separate destination.”Nova Sonic will be available to third-party developers through Amazon’s Bedrock service. Amazon is already using components of the model internally, in products including its newly released Alexa+ voice assistant.Unlike traditional voice systems that stitch together separate models for speech recognition, language processing, and text-to-speech, Nova Sonic combines all three in a single architecture, according to the company.Amazon says this integration allows the model to preserve the full context of a conversation — including intonation, pacing, and intent — making interactions feel more conversational and responsive.It can also take action in the middle of a conversation, like pulling up flight options or checking an account, without breaking the flow of the interaction.Amazon is making Nova Sonic available via a new streaming API built for real-time voice applications. It currently supports English with a few different voices and accents