What Is Amazon Polly?
Amazon Polly is a cloud service that converts text into lifelike speech. You can use Amazon Polly to develop applications that increase engagement and accessibility. Amazon Polly supports multiple languages and includes a variety of lifelike voices. With Amazon Polly, you can build speech-enabled applications that work in multiple locations and use the ideal voice for your customers. Also, you only pay for the text you synthesize. You can also cache and replay Amazon Polly’s generated speech at no additional cost.
Amazon Polly offers many voice options, including generative, long-form, neural, and standard text-to-speech (TTS) options. These voices deliver ground-breaking improvements in speech quality using new machine learning technology to offer the most natural and human-like text-to-speech voices possible. Neural TTS technology also supports a Newscaster speaking style, tailored to news narration use cases.
Common use cases for Amazon Polly include, but are not limited to: mobile applications such as newsreaders, games, eLearning platforms, accessibility applications for visually impaired people, and the rapidly growing segment of Internet of Things (IoT).
Amazon Polly is certified for use with regulated workloads for HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996), and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).
Benefits
Some of the benefits of using Amazon Polly include:
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High quality – Amazon Polly offers highly-performant generative, long-form, neural, and high-quality text-to-speech (TTS) voices. These technologies synthesize natural speech with high pronunciation accuracy (including abbreviations, acronym expansions, date/time interpretations, and homograph disambiguation).
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Low latency – Amazon Polly achieves fast responses, which makes it a viable option for low-latency use cases such as dialogue systems.
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Support for a large portfolio of languages and voices – Amazon Polly supports dozens of voices and languages, offering male and female voice options for most languages. This number will continue to increase as we bring more neural voices online. US English voices Matthew and Joanna can also use the Neural Newscaster speaking style, similar to what you might hear from a professional news anchor.
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Cost-effective – Amazon Polly's pay-per-use model means that there are no setup costs. Start small and scale up as your application grows.
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Cloud-based solution – On-device TTS solutions require significant computing resources, notably CPU power, RAM, and disk space. These can result in higher development costs and higher power consumption on devices such as tablets, smartphones, and so on. In contrast, TTS conversion done in the AWS Cloud dramatically reduces local resource requirements. This enables support of all the available languages and voices with outstanding quality. Moreover, speech improvements are instantly available to all end users and don't require additional updates for devices.
Note
To hear example Amazon Polly voices in your browser, see the Amazon Polly product overview
Are you a first-time user?
If you're a first-time user of Amazon Polly, we recommend that you read the following sections in the listed order:
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How Amazon Polly works – This section introduces various Amazon Polly inputs and options that you can work with in order to create a simple experience.
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Getting started with Amazon Polly – In this section, you set up your account and test Amazon Polly speech synthesis.
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Example applications – This section provides additional examples that you can use to explore Amazon Polly.
