Nova Lite
Nova Lite brings multimodal understanding of text, images, and up to 30 minutes of video to a context of 300K tokens at low per-token rates, making vision-enabled production pipelines practical at scale.
import { streamText } from 'ai'
const result = streamText({ model: 'amazon/nova-lite', prompt: 'Why is the sky blue?'})What To Consider When Choosing a Provider
Zero Data Retention
AI Gateway supports Zero Data Retention for this model via direct gateway requests (BYOK is not included). To configure this, check the documentation.Authentication
AI Gateway authenticates requests using an API key or OIDC token. You do not need to manage provider credentials directly.
Spikes hurt less than on premium tiers. AI Gateway retries and routes traffic so you don't hand-tune failover when load jumps.
When to Use Nova Lite
Best For
Long video summarization:
Meetings, lectures, and webinars using the 30-minute video input capacity
Batch image classification:
Throughput and cost matter more than nuanced reasoning for visual extraction workloads
Content moderation pipelines:
Evaluate both text and visual media at high volume
Customer-facing media uploads:
Accept image or video uploads without incurring premium per-token costs
Consider Alternatives When
Purely text-based workloads:
Nova Micro costs less and responds faster for text-only tasks
Multi-step reasoning needed:
Nova 2 Lite adds extended thinking and agentic tool use capabilities
High-accuracy structured documents:
Nova Pro is tuned for precision on financial or legal documents
Conclusion
Nova Lite keeps multimodal inputs affordable at scale. Image and video stay in budget for batch and customer-facing flows. If you need visual understanding without deep reasoning, it's a sensible default.
FAQ
Up to 30 minutes of video content per request, processed within the context window of 300K tokens. This covers most meeting recordings, lecture segments, and training videos without splitting.
Extraction and classification tasks. Examples include pulling structured data from screenshots, categorizing product photos, reading forms and receipts, and flagging content in moderation pipelines. It's optimized for speed and volume rather than complex visual reasoning.
Yes. Nova Lite accepts multiple images alongside text within a single request, which is useful for comparing two documents side by side, processing multi-page forms, or enriching product listings with photo analysis.
No. Nova Lite generates text output only. It analyzes visual inputs but does not create them.
Current pricing is shown on this page. AI Gateway routes across providers, and rates may vary by provider.
Nova Lite prioritizes throughput and cost; Nova Pro prioritizes accuracy. If your images contain dense tables, fine-print legal text, or complex diagrams requiring precise interpretation, Pro produces more reliable results. For routine classification and extraction, Lite is the more efficient choice.
