Amazon Lex launches new multilingual speech recognition models

We are excited to announce the general availability of new multilingual streaming speech recognition models (ASR-2.0) in Amazon Lex. These models enhance recognition accuracy through two specialized groupings: one European-based model supporting Portuguese, Catalan, French, Italian, German, and Spanish, and another Asia Pacific-based model supporting Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. These Amazon Lex multilingual streaming models leverage shared language patterns within each group to deliver improved recognition accuracy. The models particularly excel at recognizing alphanumeric speech, making it easier to accurately understand customer utterances that are often needed to identify callers and automate tasks in Interactive Voice Response (IVR) applications. For example, the new models better recognize account numbers, confirmation numbers, serial numbers, and product codes. These improvements extend to all regional variants of supported languages (for example, both European French and Canadian French will benefit from this enhancement). Additionally, the new models demonstrate improved recognition accuracy for non-native speakers and various regional accents, making interactions more inclusive and reliable. These models are now the standard for supported languages in Amazon Lex, and customers simply need to rebuild their existing bots to take advantage of these improvements. The new ASR-2.0 models are now available in all regions that support Amazon Lex V2.