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AWS Documentation » Amazon Polly » Developer Guide » Amazon Polly: How It Works » Voices in Amazon Polly

Voices in Amazon Polly

Amazon Polly provides a variety of different voices in multiple languages for use when synthesizing speech from text.

Available Voices

Language

Female Names/ID

Male Names/ID

Arabic (arb)

Zeina

Chinese, Mandarin (cmn-CN)

Zhiyu

Danish (da-DK)

Naja

Mads

Dutch (nl-NL)

Lotte

Ruben

English (Australian) (en-AU)

Nicole

Russell

English (British) (en-GB)

Amy

Emma

Brian

English (Indian) (en-IN)

Aditi (bilingual with Hindi)

Raveena

English (US) (en-US)

Ivy

Joanna

Kendra

Kimberly

Salli

Joey

Justin

Matthew

English (Welsh) (en-GB-WLS)

Geraint

French (fr-FR)

Céline/Celine

Mathieu

French (Canadian) (fr-CA)

Chantal

German (de-DE)

Marlene

Vicki

Hans

Hindi (hi-IN)

Aditi (bilingual with Indian English)

Icelandic (is-IS)

Dóra/Dora

Karl

Italian (it-IT)

Carla

Bianca

Giorgio

Japanese (ja-JP)

Mizuki

Takumi

Korean (ko-KR)

Seoyeon

Norwegian (nb-NO)

Liv

Polish (pl-PL)

Ewa

Maja

Jacek

Jan

Portuguese (Brazilian) (pt-BR)

Vitória/Vitoria

Ricardo

Portuguese (European) (pt-PT)

Inês/Ines

Cristiano

Romanian (ro-RO)

Carmen

Russian (ru-RU)

Tatyana

Maxim

Spanish (European) (es-ES)

Conchita

Lucia

Enrique

Spanish (Mexican) (es-MX)

Mia

Spanish (US) (es-US)

Penélope/Penelope

Miguel

Swedish (sv-SE)

Astrid

Turkish (tr-TR)

Filiz

Welsh (cy-GB)

Gwyneth

To ensure continuous support for customers, we don't plan to retire any voices. This applies to both currently available and future voices.

Listening to the Voices

You can use the Amazon Polly console to hear a sample from any of the voices available in Amazon Polly

To listen to a voice in Amazon Polly

  1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the Amazon Polly console.

  2. Choose the Text-to-Speech tab.

  3. Choose a language and region, then choose a voice

  4. Enter text for the voice to speak or use the default phrase and then choose Listen to speech.

You can choose any of the languages offered by Amazon Polly and the console will display the voices available for that language. In most cases, there will be at least one male and one female voice, often more than one of each. One voice is bilingual (Hindi and Indian English) and a few only have a single voice.

Note

The inventory of voices and the number of languages included is continually being updated to include additional choices. To suggest a new language or voice, feel free to provide feedback on this page. Unfortunately, we are not able to comment on plans for specific new languages be they are released.

Each voice is created using native language speakers, so there are variations from voice to voice, even within the same language. When selecting a voice for your project, you should test each of the possible voices with a passage of text to see which best suits your needs.

Voice Speed

Because of the natural variation between voices, each available voice will speak the text at slightly different speeds. For instance, with US English voices, Ivy and Joanna are slightly faster than Matthew when saying "Mary had a little lamb," and considerably faster than Joey.

Since there is so much variation between voices, and the degree of that variation can depend on the text being spoken, no standard speed (words per minute) is available for Amazon Polly voices. However, you can find how long it takes for your voice to say the selected text using SpeechMarks. For more information on using speechmarks in Amazon Polly, see Using Speech Marks

To see approximately how long it takes to speak a text passage

  1. Open the AWS CLI.

  2. Run the following code, filling in as needed

         aws polly synthesize-speech \
          --language-code optional language code if needed
          --output-format json \
          --voice-id [name of desired voice] \
          --text '[desired text]' \
          --speech-mark-types='["viseme"]' \
          LengthOfText.txt

  3. Open LengthOfText.txt

If the text were "Mary had a little lamb," the last few lines returned by Amazon Polly would be: 

     {"time":882,"type":"viseme","value":"t"}
     {"time":964,"type":"viseme","value":"a"}
     {"time":1082,"type":"viseme","value":"p"}

The last viseme, essentially the sound for the final letters in "lamb" starts 1082 milliseconds after the beginning of the speech. While this is not exactly the length of the audio, it's close and can serve as the basis for comparison between voices.

For certain applications, you may find that you'd prefer the voice you like be slowed down, or speeded up. If the speed of the voice is a concern, Amazon Polly provides the ability to modify this using SSML tags.

For example, if your intended audience speaks English, but not fluently, you might consider slowing the rate of speech in order to give them a little more time for comprehension.

Amazon Polly helps you slow down the rate of speech using the SSML <prosody> tag, as in: 

     <prosody rate="slow">Mary had a little lamb.</prosody>

Five different speed options are available to you: x-slow, slow, medium, fast, and x-fast. The speed of each option is approximate, depending on your preferred voice, so we recommend that you test your selected voice to see if it meets your needs. The medium option is the normal speed of the voice.