The AWS re:Invent 2016 event, attended by 32,000 on-site and 50,000 online participants, featured the launch of new services including Amazon Lex for conversational interfaces, Amazon Polly for text-to-speech, and Amazon Rekognition for image analysis. Key announcements included new EC2 instance types, enhancements in data processing with AWS Glue, and the introduction of services like Amazon Athena for data analysis and AWS Shield for DDoS protection. The event also covered innovations in serverless computing, machine learning, and integration capabilities among AWS services.