Amazon Nova Models Overview
Amazon Nova is AWS’s family of foundation models (FMs) available exclusively through Amazon Bedrock. Launched at AWS re:Invent 2024 and significantly expanded at re:Invent 2025, the Nova family spans text generation, multimodal understanding, image generation, video generation, speech-to-speech conversation, browser automation, and custom model building.
Nova models are designed to deliver frontier intelligence at industry-leading price performance, making them a compelling choice for enterprises looking to reduce costs while maintaining high-quality AI outputs.
Amazon Nova Model Family
The Nova family is organized into several categories:
- Understanding Models – Process text, images, video, and/or speech to generate text (Nova Micro, Nova Lite, Nova Pro, Nova Premier, Nova 2 Lite, Nova 2 Pro)
- Creative Content Generation – Generate images or video from text/image inputs (Nova Canvas, Nova Reel)
- Speech Models – Real-time bidirectional voice conversation (Nova Sonic, Nova 2 Sonic)
- Multimodal Generation – Unified input and output across modalities (Nova 2 Omni)
- Agentic – Browser-based UI automation (Nova Act)
- Custom Model Building – Build your own frontier model variants (Nova Forge)
First Generation Nova Models (re:Invent 2024)
Amazon Nova Micro
- Text-only model delivering the lowest latency responses in the Nova family at very low cost.
- Context window: 128K tokens
- Input: Text only
- Output: Text only
- Optimized for speed and cost — excels at text summarization, translation, content classification, interactive chat, brainstorming, and simple mathematical reasoning and coding.
- Supports customization via fine-tuning and model distillation.
- Pricing: ~$0.035/1M input tokens, ~$0.14/1M output tokens (lowest in the Nova family)
Amazon Nova Lite
- Very low-cost multimodal model that is lightning fast for processing image, video, and text inputs.
- Context window: 300K tokens
- Input: Text, images, video (up to 30 minutes)
- Output: Text
- Handles real-time customer interactions, document analysis, and visual question-answering with high accuracy.
- Supports text and multimodal fine-tuning and model distillation.
- Pricing: ~$0.06/1M input tokens, ~$0.24/1M output tokens
Amazon Nova Pro
- Highly capable multimodal model with the best combination of accuracy, speed, and cost for a wide range of tasks.
- Context window: 300K tokens
- Input: Text, images, video
- Output: Text
- Sets standards in multimodal intelligence and agentic workflows requiring API/tool calling.
- Excels at visual question answering, video understanding, financial document analysis, and processing code bases with over 15,000 lines.
- Serves as a teacher model for distilling custom variants of Nova Micro and Lite.
- Pricing: ~$0.80/1M input tokens, ~$3.20/1M output tokens
Amazon Nova Premier
- Most capable multimodal model for complex reasoning tasks and the best teacher for distilling custom models.
- Context window: 1M tokens
- Input: Text, images, video
- Output: Text
- Designed for the most demanding enterprise workloads requiring highest accuracy.
- Best suited for complex multi-step reasoning, research, and as a distillation teacher.
Amazon Nova Canvas
- State-of-the-art image generation model producing studio-quality images.
- Input: Text prompts, reference images
- Output: Images (up to 2048×2048)
- Features precise control over style and content with rich editing capabilities:
- Inpainting and outpainting
- Background removal
- Color conditioning
- Subject-consistent generation
- Includes built-in watermarking for responsible AI use.
- Pricing: Per-image pricing, varies by resolution
Amazon Nova Reel
- State-of-the-art video generation model for producing short videos.
- Input: Text prompts, reference images
- Output: Video (1280×720, 24fps, 6-second clips)
- Supports camera control actions (zoom, pan, tilt, dolly) and visual style guidance.
- Ideal for marketing, advertising, social media content, and entertainment.
- Uses asynchronous API (StartAsyncInvoke) as video generation takes several minutes.
- Includes digital watermarking on all generated videos.
Amazon Nova Sonic
- Speech-to-speech foundation model enabling real-time, human-like voice conversations with low latency.
- Input: Speech (audio), text
- Output: Speech (audio), text
- Unifies speech understanding and generation into a single model architecture.
- Supports natural turn-taking, interruption handling, and expressive voices (masculine and feminine).
- Multilingual support: English, Spanish, French, Italian, and German.
- Integrates with Amazon Connect, telephony providers (Vonage, Twilio, AudioCodes), and conversational AI frameworks (LiveKit, Pipecat).
- Uses bidirectional streaming API for real-time interaction.
Second Generation Nova Models (re:Invent 2025)
At AWS re:Invent 2025, Amazon announced the Nova 2 family with four new models, plus Nova Forge and Nova Act.
Amazon Nova 2 Lite
- Fast, cost-effective reasoning model for everyday workloads.
- Context window: 1M tokens (1 million)
- Input: Text, images, video, documents
- Output: Text (up to 65,536 tokens)
- Features adjustable thinking effort — developers can control how much step-by-step reasoning the model performs before responding, balancing intelligence depth with speed and cost.
- Built-in tools:
- Web grounding — searches the web for current information with citations
- Code interpreter — runs code directly within the workflow
- Remote MCP tool support
- Excels in document processing, video information extraction, code generation, grounded answers, and multi-step agentic workflows.
- Competitive benchmarks: Equal or better on 13/15 benchmarks vs Claude Haiku 4.5, 11/17 vs GPT-5 Mini, 14/18 vs Gemini Flash 2.5.
- Supports customization via Nova Forge.
- Pricing: ~$0.30–0.33/1M input tokens, ~$2.50–2.75/1M output tokens
Amazon Nova 2 Pro
- Amazon’s most intelligent reasoning model for highly complex tasks.
- Context window: 1M tokens
- Input: Text, images, video, speech
- Output: Text (up to 65,536 tokens)
- Ideal for agentic coding, long-range planning, and sophisticated problem-solving where highest accuracy is essential.
- Serves as a teacher model for knowledge distillation into smaller, more efficient student models.
- Built-in web grounding and code execution capabilities.
- Competitive benchmarks: Equal or better on 10/16 vs Claude Sonnet 4.5, 8/16 vs GPT-5.1, 15/19 vs Gemini 2.5 Pro.
- Strengths: Multi-document analysis, video reasoning, complex instructions, advanced math, agentic and software engineering tasks.
Amazon Nova 2 Sonic
- Next-generation speech-to-speech model for real-time conversational AI.
- Context window: 1M tokens
- Input: Speech, text
- Output: Speech, text
- Key improvements over Nova Sonic:
- Expanded multilingual support with native expressivity
- Higher accuracy and more natural voices
- Cross-modal interaction — seamless switching between voice and text in the same session
- Asynchronous tool calling — handles tasks in the background without interrupting conversation
- 1M token context window for sustained interactions
- Integrates with Amazon Connect, Vonage, Twilio, AudioCodes, LiveKit, and Pipecat.
- Industry-leading price performance vs OpenAI gpt-realtime and Gemini 2.5 Flash realtime APIs.
Amazon Nova 2 Omni
- Unified multimodal reasoning AND generation model — an industry first.
- Context window: 1M tokens
- Input: Text, images, video, speech, documents
- Output: Text AND images
- Can process up to 750,000 words, hours of audio, long videos, and hundred-page documents simultaneously.
- Eliminates the need to connect multiple specialized models — handles understanding and generation in one workflow.
- Supports 200+ languages for text processing, 10 languages for speech input.
- Image generation capabilities include character consistency, text rendering within images, and object/background modification.
- Use case example: Marketing teams can analyze product details across all formats and generate complete campaigns (headlines, copy, social posts, visuals) in one workflow.
- Status: Preview (as of December 2025)
Amazon Nova Act
- AWS service for building and deploying highly reliable AI agents that automate browser-based UI workflows.
- Powered by a custom Nova 2 Lite model trained through reinforcement learning on hundreds of simulated web environments.
- Achieves 90% reliability on early customer workflows — outperforms competing models on relevant benchmarks.
- Key capabilities:
- No-code playground for prototyping agents with natural language prompts
- IDE integration (VS Code) for refinement
- Deploy to AWS with comprehensive management tools and monitoring via Nova Act console
- What you build locally scales in production
- Use cases:
- Updating data in CRM systems
- Testing website functionality (QA automation)
- Submitting health insurance claims
- Reconciling payments and coordinating shipments
- End-to-end testing across platforms
- Customer results:
- Hertz: 5x faster software delivery, eliminated QA bottleneck
- 1Password: Automated logins across hundreds of websites
- Sola Systems: Hundreds of thousands of automated workflows per month
- Status: Generally Available (December 2025)
Amazon Nova Forge
- First-of-its-kind service for organizations to build their own frontier AI model variants (“Novellas”).
- Pioneers “open training” — gives exclusive access to pre-trained, mid-trained, and post-trained Nova model checkpoints.
- Customers can mix proprietary data with Amazon Nova-curated datasets at every stage of model training.
- Solves the three compromises of traditional model customization:
- Surface-level customization of proprietary models
- Open-weights models losing capabilities during continued training
- Building from scratch at enormous expense
- Key capabilities:
- Open training checkpoints — blend proprietary data at pre-training, mid-training, and post-training stages
- Reinforcement learning “gyms” — synthetic environments for training models on simulated real-world scenarios
- Synthetic data-based distillation — create smaller, faster models that maintain intelligence
- Responsible AI toolkit — implement safety controls
- Currently available with Nova 2 Lite; early access to Nova 2 Pro and Nova 2 Omni for Forge customers.
- Custom models deploy on Amazon Bedrock with enterprise-grade security, scalability, and data privacy.
- Customers: Booking.com, Reddit, Sony, Cosine AI, Nimbus Therapeutics, Nomura Research Institute, OpenBabylon.
Amazon Nova Model Comparison Table
| Model | Input Types | Output Types | Context Window | Latency | Price Tier | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nova Micro | Text | Text | 128K | Lowest | $ (Lowest) | Chat, summarization, classification |
| Nova Lite | Text, Image, Video | Text | 300K | Very Low | $ | Multimodal Q&A, document analysis |
| Nova Pro | Text, Image, Video | Text | 300K | Low | $$ | Agentic workflows, complex analysis |
| Nova Premier | Text, Image, Video | Text | 1M | Medium | $$$ | Complex reasoning, model distillation |
| Nova Canvas | Text, Image | Image | N/A | Medium | Per image | Image generation, editing |
| Nova Reel | Text, Image | Video | N/A | High (async) | Per video | Video content creation |
| Nova Sonic | Speech, Text | Speech, Text | N/A | Real-time | $$ | Voice assistants, IVR |
| Nova 2 Lite | Text, Image, Video, Docs | Text | 1M | Low | $$ | Reasoning, coding, agentic tasks |
| Nova 2 Pro | Text, Image, Video, Speech | Text | 1M | Medium | $$$ | Complex reasoning, agentic coding |
| Nova 2 Sonic | Speech, Text | Speech, Text | 1M | Real-time | $$ | Conversational AI, async tool use |
| Nova 2 Omni | Text, Image, Video, Speech | Text, Image | 1M | Medium | $$$ | Unified multimodal workflows |
| Nova Act | Natural language prompts | Browser actions | N/A | Variable | Per workflow | UI automation, QA testing |
| Nova Forge | Training data + checkpoints | Custom model | N/A | N/A (training) | Custom | Building domain-specific models |
When to Use Each Nova Model
| Scenario | Recommended Model | Why |
|---|---|---|
| High-volume chatbot with lowest cost | Nova Micro / Nova 2 Lite | Lowest per-token cost, fast response times |
| Document/image analysis at scale | Nova 2 Lite | 1M context, multimodal, cost-effective reasoning |
| Complex multi-step agentic coding | Nova 2 Pro | Highest intelligence, built-in tools |
| Building custom domain model | Nova Forge + Nova 2 Lite/Pro | Open training with proprietary data |
| Marketing image generation | Nova Canvas | Studio-quality with precise controls |
| Social media video creation | Nova Reel | Professional video from text/image prompts |
| Voice-based customer service | Nova 2 Sonic | Real-time, natural conversation with tool use |
| Unified content generation pipeline | Nova 2 Omni | Single model for text + image generation from any input |
| Browser-based QA testing | Nova Act | 90% reliability, production-ready UI automation |
| Knowledge distillation | Nova Premier / Nova 2 Pro | Best teacher models for creating efficient custom variants |
Amazon Nova vs Competitors
| Capability | Amazon Nova | Anthropic Claude | OpenAI GPT | Meta Llama |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Model range | Micro to Premier + specialized (Canvas, Reel, Sonic, Act) | Haiku, Sonnet, Opus | GPT-4o mini, GPT-4o, GPT-5 | 8B, 70B, 405B (open weights) |
| Multimodal input | Text, image, video, speech, documents | Text, image, documents | Text, image, audio | Text, image |
| Image generation | Nova Canvas, Nova 2 Omni | No | DALL-E (separate) | No |
| Video generation | Nova Reel | No | Sora (separate) | No |
| Speech-to-speech | Nova Sonic / Nova 2 Sonic | No | GPT Realtime API | No |
| Context window | Up to 1M tokens | 200K tokens | 128K–1M tokens | 128K tokens |
| Browser automation | Nova Act | Computer Use (beta) | Operator | No |
| Custom model building | Nova Forge (open training) | No | Fine-tuning only | Full open weights |
| Price performance | Industry-leading (75% less than comparable models) | Premium pricing | Premium pricing | Free weights (self-host costs) |
| AWS integration | Native (Bedrock, Connect, S3) | Via Bedrock | Via Bedrock (select models) | Via Bedrock |
Key Differentiators for Amazon Nova
- Breadth of modalities: No other single model family covers text, image, video, speech generation + browser automation + custom model building.
- Price performance: Nova models consistently offer 3-5x better cost efficiency than comparable alternatives.
- Nova Forge uniqueness: Only platform offering “open training” with access to model checkpoints at pre/mid/post-training stages.
- Native AWS ecosystem: Deep integration with Bedrock, Knowledge Bases, Agents, Guardrails, Connect, and S3.
- Built-in safety: All models include safety controls; creative models include watermarking.
Amazon Bedrock Integration
All Nova models are accessed through Amazon Bedrock, providing:
- Unified API: Single Converse API for all text/multimodal models; async invoke for creative models.
- Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases: Enhance Nova models with proprietary information via RAG.
- Amazon Bedrock Agents: Build multi-step agentic workflows with Nova models.
- Amazon Bedrock Guardrails: Apply content filters, PII detection, and grounding checks.
- Cross-Region Inference: Available for Nova Micro, Lite, Pro, and Nova 2 models across multiple regions.
- Intelligent Prompt Routing: Automatically route between Nova Pro and Nova Lite based on prompt complexity (up to 30% cost savings).
- Model Customization: Fine-tuning, continued pre-training, and distillation support.
- Batch Inference: 50% lower price for high-volume offline workloads.
- Provisioned Throughput: Guaranteed capacity for production workloads.
Bedrock Model IDs
amazon.nova-micro-v1:0– Nova Microamazon.nova-lite-v1:0– Nova Liteamazon.nova-pro-v1:0– Nova Proamazon.nova-premier-v1:0– Nova Premieramazon.nova-canvas-v1:0– Nova Canvasamazon.nova-reel-v1:0– Nova Reelamazon.nova-sonic-v1:0– Nova Sonicamazon.nova-2-lite-v1:0– Nova 2 Liteamazon.nova-2-pro-v1:0– Nova 2 Pro
AWS Certification – AIF-C01 Relevance
Amazon Nova models are highly relevant for the AWS Certified AI Practitioner (AIF-C01) exam:
- Domain 1 – Fundamentals of AI and ML: Understanding foundation model types, model selection criteria, multimodal capabilities.
- Domain 2 – Fundamentals of Generative AI: Foundation model families, model selection based on use case requirements (cost, latency, accuracy), understanding of text/image/video/speech generation.
- Domain 3 – Applications of Foundation Models: RAG integration, agentic workflows, model customization (fine-tuning vs distillation vs continued pre-training vs open training).
- Domain 4 – Guidelines for Responsible AI: Built-in safety controls, watermarking, Bedrock Guardrails integration.
Key exam concepts related to Nova:
- Difference between understanding models and generative models
- Model selection based on latency, cost, and capability requirements
- Customization methods: fine-tuning, distillation, continued pre-training, Nova Forge open training
- Responsible AI: watermarking, safety controls, content moderation
- Bedrock features: Guardrails, Knowledge Bases, Agents, cross-region inference
- Agentic AI capabilities and Nova Act for UI automation
Amazon Nova Models – Practice Questions
1. A company needs to build a high-volume customer service chatbot that must respond to text queries with the lowest possible latency and minimal cost. Which Amazon Nova model should they choose?
- Amazon Nova Pro
- Amazon Nova Micro
- Amazon Nova 2 Lite
- Amazon Nova Premier
Show Answer
Answer: B –
Explanation: Amazon Nova Micro is a text-only model designed specifically for the lowest latency responses at the lowest cost in the Nova family. It is optimized for tasks like interactive chat, text summarization, and content classification. While Nova 2 Lite also offers good performance, Nova Micro provides the absolute lowest latency for text-only use cases.
2. A media company wants to use a single AI model to analyze product videos, customer testimonials (audio), brand guidelines (documents), and product images — then generate marketing copy AND promotional images in one unified workflow. Which Amazon Nova model enables this?
- Amazon Nova Pro
- Amazon Nova Canvas
- Amazon Nova 2 Omni
- Amazon Nova 2 Pro + Nova Canvas (pipeline)
Show Answer
Answer: C –
Explanation: Amazon Nova 2 Omni is the industry’s first unified multimodal reasoning and generation model that can process text, images, video, and speech inputs while generating BOTH text AND images. This eliminates the need to chain multiple specialized models. Nova Pro and Nova 2 Pro only output text, and Nova Canvas only generates images from text/image prompts without the multimodal understanding capability.
3. An organization wants to build a custom AI model that deeply integrates their proprietary medical research data while maintaining frontier-level reasoning capabilities. They need access to model training checkpoints to mix their data at multiple training stages. Which Amazon service should they use?
- Amazon Bedrock Fine-tuning
- Amazon SageMaker Training
- Amazon Nova Forge
- Amazon Nova 2 Pro with RAG
Show Answer
Answer: C –
Explanation: Amazon Nova Forge is the only service that provides “open training” — giving organizations access to pre-trained, mid-trained, and post-trained Nova model checkpoints so they can blend their proprietary data with Nova-curated datasets at every stage of model training. Standard fine-tuning only adjusts a model’s behavior at the post-training stage. RAG augments responses but doesn’t deeply integrate knowledge into model weights.
4. A company wants to automate end-to-end testing of their web application, including navigating pages, filling forms, and verifying UI elements. They need a solution that achieves high reliability and can scale in production on AWS. Which Amazon Nova offering should they use?
- Amazon Nova 2 Pro with Bedrock Agents
- Amazon Nova Act
- Amazon Nova 2 Lite with custom prompts
- Amazon Nova Forge
Show Answer
Answer: B –
Explanation: Amazon Nova Act is specifically designed for building and deploying AI agents that automate browser-based UI workflows. It achieves 90% reliability through reinforcement learning training on hundreds of simulated web environments. It provides a no-code playground for prototyping, IDE integration for development, and production deployment on AWS with monitoring. Hertz used Nova Act to accelerate software delivery 5x by automating end-to-end testing.
5. A developer is building a voice-based AI assistant that needs to handle real-time conversations, switch between voice and text seamlessly, execute background tasks (like booking flights) without interrupting the conversation, and maintain context over long interactions. Which Amazon Nova model is best suited? (Select TWO capabilities that make it ideal)
- Amazon Nova Sonic — because it supports bidirectional streaming
- Amazon Nova 2 Sonic — because it supports asynchronous tool calling and 1M token context window
- Amazon Nova 2 Lite — because it has web grounding and code interpreter
- Amazon Nova 2 Omni — because it generates text and images
- Amazon Nova 2 Sonic — because it supports cross-modal interaction (voice/text switching)
Show Answer
Answer: B, E
Explanation: Amazon Nova 2 Sonic is the ideal model for this use case. It features: (1) asynchronous tool calling that lets users continue natural conversations while background tasks complete, (2) cross-modal interaction allowing seamless switching between voice and text, and (3) a 1M token context window for sustained interactions. While Nova Sonic (v1) supports real-time streaming, it lacks the async tool calling, cross-modal switching, and extended context window that Nova 2 Sonic provides.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are Amazon Nova models?
Amazon Nova is AWS’s own family of foundation models available through Bedrock. It includes text models (Micro, Lite, Pro, Premier), creative models (Canvas for images, Reel for video, Sonic for speech), and agent models (Act for browser automation, Forge for custom training).
Which Nova model should I use?
Use Nova Micro for fast text tasks (lowest cost). Nova Lite for multimodal with budget constraints. Nova Pro for balanced performance. Nova Premier for complex reasoning. Nova 2 Lite for extended thinking with 1M token context. Nova Act for browser-based agent automation.
How does Nova compare to Claude and GPT?
Nova Pro offers competitive performance at lower cost than Claude 3.5 Sonnet or GPT-4o for many tasks. Nova’s key advantages are native AWS integration, lower pricing, and specialized models (Canvas, Reel, Sonic) that competitors don’t offer as integrated options.