What is Amazon Polly?
Amazon Polly is a text-to-speech service that uses advanced deep learning technologies to convert text into lifelike speech.
Amazon Polly lets you create applications that talk and build entirely new categories of speech-enabled products. Amazon Polly is an Amazon AI service that uses advanced machine learning technologies to synthesize speech that sounds like a human voice.
Amazon Polly is a cost-effective way for SMEs to make their content more accessible with engaging,natural-sounding voices powered by Amazon AI.
Amazon Polly delivers accurate, pronunciation, intonation, and emotion to improve customer experience. Machine learning (ML) algorithms analyze the input text and natural language processing (NLP) techniques are used to determine the correct pronunciation of words.
Amazon Polly supports multiple languages and dozens of lifelike voices so that you can create global, natural-sounding applications.
Amazon text to speech
Amazon’s text-to-speech service, nicknamed Polly makes it easy to create applications that speak naturally. Or so it claims.
One of the challenges of text-to-speech synthesis is making the output sound natural. Amazon Polly uses Amazon’s massive parallel cloud computing platform to train its neural network models. This gives Amazon Polly an advantage over other text-to-speech systems, which are limited by the amount of processing power available on a single computer.
Amazon Polly is constantly improving its speech synthesis to make it sound more natural. The recent addition of prosody control makes Amazon Polly sound even more like a human voice. Prosody control manages the rhythm, pitch, and intonation of the synthesized speech, making it sound more natural and less like a robot.
How Does Amazon Polly Work?
Amazon Polly can be used as part of a workflow in which written text is submitted to Amazon Polly, which then outputs the audio in multiple formats.
Amazon Polly can also be used to create podcasts or to record and store audio files for later use.
Amazon Polly is a useful tool for businesses or individuals who need to convert written text into audio format, or who need to record and store audio files.
Amazon Polly is easy to use and offers a variety of options for outputting audio files.
Amazon Polly is a reliable and cost-effective way to create audio files from written text.
Is Amazon Polly Any Good?
Amazon Polly is a great way to get started with text-to-speech synthesis. You can use it free as part of the AWS Free Usage Tier.
The demo version is very generous, allowing you to synthesize millions of characters for free each month for the first 12 months.
Is Amazon Polly useful?
Yes, Amazon Polly can be useful because it allows you to generate speech from text, which can be helpful in many situations such as if you are hard of hearing or if you want to listen to something rather than read it.
Additionally, Amazon Polly has a number of different voices that you can choose from, so you can find one that suits your needs.
Can I use Amazon Polly for free?
Jeff Bezos hasn’t become one of the wealthiest men on the planet by giving away Amazon’s services for free. But with that said, yes, you can start using Amazon Polly for free as part of the AWS Free Usage Tier.
As we discussed above, this tier provides you with a very generous amount of monthly usage, including up to 5 million characters per month for the first 12 months.
Is Amazon Polly Better Than Its Competitors?
Amazon Polly has a lot of features that make it unique, and not only in the Amazon ecosystem.
Amazon Polly charges per character versus other text-to-speech applications that charge per month or per minute.
This, in many use cases, makes Amazon Polly more cost-effective for those who need to use the application frequently.
Amazon Polly also offers a number of different languages and accents, which many competitors do not have on the menu.
The main competitors for Amazon Polly are Azure, Watson, and Google Cloud. These three companies, all run by IT giants like Microsoft, IBM, and Google, all have their own pros and cons, but Amazon Polly still stands out as the most cost-effective and feature-rich text-to-speech application on the market.
Who uses Amazon Polly?
We’ve already seen how Amazon Polly offers 47 lifelike voices across 24 languages, so you can select the ideal voice and build engaging, natural-sounding speech experiences.
As one of the most widespread and obvious use-cases, Amazon Polly is used by companies around the world to improve customer engagement and build more natural-sounding conversational interfaces when it comes to customer support.
But millions of students also use Amazon Polly to help them assess and advance their English (or another language) skills.
Then, of course, Amazon Polly is the backbone of the voice of services like Amazon Alexa, and other “speaking” applications, whose goal is to sound as human-like and natural as possible.
Amazon Polly Pricing
Amazon Polly offers a free demo version and a paid version that comes with Amazon Web Services (AWS) packages.
Amazon Polly pricing is based on the number of characters in the input text, the length of the audio, and the number of speeches.
Amazon Polly offers a free demo version that allows you to convert up to 5 million characters per month.
The paid version starts at $4 per 1 million characters for the first 1 million characters per month.
After that, it costs $2 per 1 million characters. Amazon Polly includes 47 voices in 24 languages.
You can also buy additional language packs. For example, Amazon Polly offers an English (US) voice pack that includes 8 voices for $0.99 per month.
Amazon Polly also offers an Amazon Lex voice pack that includes 2 voices for $4.99 per month. Amazon Polly charges for the number of seconds you use each voice. Amazon Polly pricing is based on the length of time you use each voice, not on the number of characters in the input text or on the length of the audio file.
For example, if you use the Amazon Lex voice for 5 minutes, you will be charged $0.99 (5 minutes x $0.20 per minute). If you use the Amazon Polly voice for 3 minutes, you will be charged $1.47 (3 minutes x $0.49 per minute).
Amazon Polly offers a free trial that allows you to try all features and voices free of charge for 14 days.
Needless to say that Amazon can change the pricing structure or the actual price of the service as it sees fit.