Amazon Nova 2.5 Sonic is generally available in Bedrock

On 5 October 2026 AWS posted Announcing Amazon Nova 2.5 Sonic with improved reasoning for voice agents. The page says general availability of Amazon Nova 2.5 Sonic, a speech-to-speech model for real-time voice agents. The page record carries postDateTime 2026-10-05T08:10:00Z. The visible line is “Posted on: Oct 5, 2026.”

Regions and price

Nova 2.5 Sonic is in Amazon Bedrock in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Stockholm), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo): us-east-1, us-west-2, eu-north-1, and ap-northeast-1. AWS says the price is the same as Nova 2 Sonic and does not print a dollar rate.

The Bedrock pricing page, opened the next morning, lists Amazon Nova 2 Sonic speech and text rows and has no Nova 2.5 Sonic row. Rates there load through a pricing widget. The HTML retrieved for this check has no numeric Nova 2 Sonic price, so none is printed here. “The same pricing as Nova 2 Sonic” remains AWS’s sentence.

The regional availability table, opened 6 October, lists Amazon Nova 2 Sonic in those four Regions and does not list Nova 2.5 Sonic.

What AWS claims, and the context split

AWS attributes the release to “improved reasoning, instruction following, and tool-calling accuracy” and to “lower latency.” The example is a customer-service agent that looks up an order, checks return eligibility, and starts a return in one conversation. That is an illustration. The post has no score, no millisecond figure, and no tool-call accuracy rate.

Nova 2.5 Sonic builds on existing capabilities: speech understanding, expressive voices in seven languages, controllable turn-taking, voice and text in the same session, asynchronous tool calling, and a 256K context window. The seven languages are not named.

The Amazon Nova models page repeats the reasoning, instruction-following, tool-calling, and latency claims. It says the model supports seven languages, polyglot voices, voice and text in one session, asynchronous tool use, and “a context window of up to 1M tokens.” The what’s-new post says 256K. The models page says up to 1M. Both are Amazon pages opened on 6 October, and they disagree.

What is Amazon Nova 2? and What’s new in Amazon Nova 2 still describe Nova 2 Lite, Nova 2 Sonic, and Nova Multimodal Embeddings. They do not mention Nova 2.5 Sonic. The Nova 2 Sonic model card is the earlier model: id amazon.nova-2-sonic-v1:0, a 1M context window on that card, launch date 2 December 2025. A parallel URL for a Nova 2.5 Sonic card redirected to the Bedrock user-guide index and did not serve a 2.5 card. No Bedrock model id for 2.5 Sonic appeared on the AWS pages opened here.

Strands Bidi Agents

The announcement points at Strands Bidi Agents, “now generally available,” for voice agents in a few lines of code, with longer conversations and connections to other agents. The Strands post, 5 October 2026, by Albert Zhao, Morgan Willis, Rachit Mehta, and Patrick Gray, announces Bidi Agents in general availability for speech-to-speech agents, with support named for Amazon Nova Sonic, OpenAI, and Gemini. The models named in the body are GPT-Realtime-2.1, Gemini 3.8 Live, and Amazon Nova 2.5 Sonic.

The sample uses BedrockNovaSonicModel with model_id="amazon.nova-2-5-sonic". That string is Strands’ example. It is not on an AWS model card opened for this check. The install line is pip install "strands-agents[bidi-all,bidi-pyaudio]". The repository strands-agents/harness-sdk, which strands-agents/sdk-python redirects to, describes itself as an open-source SDK for Python and TypeScript. The GitHub API reports Apache-2.0. The GA samples are Python.

Strands says Bidi Agents restart a connection before a session cap, gives Nova 2.5 Sonic’s limit as 8 minutes, and says that cap can be extended in Bidi Agents. The AWS post does not state 8 minutes. The post also describes microphone echo suppression, OpenTelemetry spans, and handing work to another agent.

Practical takeaway

Use the what’s-new post for the GA line, the four Regions, and the same-price sentence. Context is 256K there and up to 1M on the Nova models page. No 2.5 model id was on the Nova 2 guide or the Nova 2 Sonic card. Strands’ amazon.nova-2-5-sonic string, the named providers, and the 8-minute limit are the Bidi Agents post.