Amazon Consolidates Rufus Into Alexa for Shopping

AWS has published a technical guide for building a voice-based healthcare appointment agent using Amazon Nova 2 Sonic and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore. The agent handles patient authentication, appointment confirmation or rescheduling, and health information collection through natural speech conversation. US healthcare no-show rates range from 5-30 percent by specialty, representing significant lost revenue and provider time.

Loka built a voice AI agent using Amazon Nova 2 Sonic that processes audio end-to-end rather than converting speech to text and back, reducing response latency from 3-5 seconds to near-real-time while lowering costs. The approach achieved a speech reasoning score of 87.0 on Big Bench Audio, outperforming Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash (71.0) and OpenAI's GPT Realtime (83.0). The solution addresses a core frustration with traditional voice assistants: robotic, slow responses that damage customer experience and increase support costs.

ByteDance unveiled Seedance 2.5, an upgraded AI video generation model, at a Beijing conference on Tuesday. The new model improves upon Seedance 2.0, which was previously recognized as a significant breakthrough in AI video generation.

Fika Jobs, a Stockholm-based startup, has raised $4 million to develop a video-first hiring platform that uses AI interview agents alongside short-form video candidate profiles. The platform blends elements of LinkedIn and TikTok to streamline recruitment. The funding supports the company's expansion of its AI-driven interview and candidate discovery capabilities.