Overview
- Tool name: Amazon Nova 2
- Developer: Amazon (AWS)
- Official website: https://aws.amazon.com/nova/
- Category: AI Models
- Delivery: Amazon Bedrock
Amazon Nova 2 is AWS's second-generation in-house foundation model family (Nova 2 Sonic went GA on December 2, 2025, with Lite following), designed for production AI applications with an emphasis on low latency, cost efficiency and deep AWS integration:
- Nova 2 Lite: a fast, cost-effective reasoning model for everyday tasks (service chatbots, document processing, business automation). Includes thinking-intensity controls (off/low/medium/high), built-in tools (web grounding and a code interpreter), remote MCP tool support and a 1M-token context window
- Nova 2 Pro (preview): the flagship for highly complex workloads - advanced multi-step reasoning, long-horizon planning and complex agentic workflows; also the best teacher model for distillation
- Nova 2 Sonic: the speech-to-speech model for real-time conversational AI - unifying speech understanding and generation in one model, with 7 languages, seamless voice/text switching within a session and asynchronous tool use; the May 2026 refresh cut speech hallucinations by 88% and speaker drift by 52%
- Nova multimodal embeddings: the first single model to embed text, documents, images, video and audio in one unified space
Customization
Nova 2 Lite ships the most complete customization suite of any proprietary family: pretraining, SFT and RFT across Bedrock and SageMaker AI, plus Nova Forge for building your own frontier model from proprietary data. Reported results include 33% faster response times at Securonix and up to 60% better tool-call efficiency in AWS Transform.
Who it is for
- Enterprise apps already on AWS: IAM permissions, VPC endpoints and encryption in transit/at rest out of the box
- Contact centers: Sonic connects directly with Amazon Connect, plus Twilio, Vonage and others
- Multimodal RAG: one unified embedding model replaces several specialized ones
Limitations
- Bedrock-only: no open weights, no self-hosting
- Nova 2 Pro remains in preview (contact your AWS account team)
- General benchmarks trail the OpenAI/Anthropic flagships; the positioning is production value, not leaderboard-first
Frequently asked questions
What is Amazon Nova 2?
AWS's second-generation in-house family: Lite (everyday reasoning), Pro (preview, complex work), Sonic (conversational voice) and multimodal embeddings, all delivered through Amazon Bedrock.
Is Nova 2 free?
It bills per usage on Bedrock with no permanent free tier (new AWS accounts have general trial credits); see the Bedrock pricing page.
Does Nova 2 Sonic support Chinese?
Seven languages are officially listed - check the AWS documentation for the current list; voice sessions support in-session language switching.
How does it relate to Claude and Llama?
All three are on Bedrock: Nova 2 is AWS's in-house value tier, Claude (Anthropic) the capability flagship, and Llama the open-weights option. You can mix them.
*This page is not affiliated with Amazon. Verified as of October 2026; see AWS's official documentation for current details.*
