Amazon Polly Text To Speech

Writing The Cache To S3

Writing to an S3 bucket is simple and well documented. However, it is worth noting that its important to make sure that all of your cache writes are valid. The simplest way to make sure that your writes are corruption-free is to use the Amazon S3 MD5 capabilities. Although this method is much more verbose than simply calling putObject, the process in the code below will use Amazon S3s MD5sum capabilities to verify your files were stored accurately.

public void putCacheResponse  else    } catch   catch         throw e    }}private String createKeyString private byte getMD5DigestForBytes  catch     return new byte }

Which Publishers Already Use Amazon Polly

Amazon Polly is extremely exciting for large and small publishers alike. While the technology is still young, some early adopters have already used Amazon Polly in their own work. Some of those publishers includeGannett, The Globe and Mail, Ringier, Success Magazine, TIM Media, Encyclopedia Britannica, and CommonLit.

Pros To Tts On Amazon

Amazon Polly offers not only English, but other languages and speech voices, and the quality is quite good. If you are an Amazon user, this can be an excellent chance for you to try out the software. At the same time, Amazon Polly works great with Alexa and other devices.

The app is easy to use, and it works great on all types of content. Furthermore, Polly works great for those who read slowly or struggle with reading due to things such as a learning disability or visual impairment. Instead of slowly going through the pages, you can turn on the app and listen to the latest news articles or other content.

It is also worth mentioning that Amazon Polly is great for integration with other apps, and if you want your app to offer the speech feature, this accessibility feature might be the solution to all of your problems.

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Getting Audio From Amazon Polly

Adding a new vendor to a multi-vendor TTS system is a surprisingly small part of the development effort required to build a full system. The following Java code is all thats required to get an audio stream from Amazon Polly:

   public Optional< VendorResponse>  textToSpeech  catch     }

How do you use the audio stream best? We have two objectives to fulfill with our stream:

You have options for streaming the InputStream from Amazon Polly to the OutputStream for your clients. The simplest is to use IOUtils.copy. However, one of our requirements, which is probably a common requirement for TTS, is to make sure clients get their voice results back as quickly as possible. We ended up opting for a more explicit approach, as shown in the following code:

private VendorResponse writeOutputStream  catch             }       }       LOG.debug        vendorResponse.setStreamEndTime)        vendorResponse.setSuccessful    } catch   finally    return vendorResponse }

This code flushes the relatively small buffer every time that it fills. This ensures that the bytes are available to the client as soon as possible, which makes a huge difference with longer texts.

Working With Aws Amazon Polly Text

Do you desire a real voice for your content? The best deal for you is the Amazon Polly TTS Service. Here is your comprehensive guide on working with the AWS Amazon Polly Text-to-Speech Service, if you want to learn more about the topic.

The leading text-to-speech solution is AWS Amazon Polly, which makes the information more captivating for the intended audience. This cloud-based tool provides a wide range of languages and lifelike voice selections. With Amazon Polly, you can build your business application that customers can access from different locations, in various languages, and with the most appropriate lifelike voice. Read further in this post to learn more about Amazon Polly Text-to-Speech Service.

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Amazon Polly Pricing Details

With Amazon Polly, you only pay for what you use. You are charged based on the number of characters of text that you convert either to speech or to Speech Marks metadata. In addition, you can cache and replay Amazon Pollys generated speech at no additional cost. It’s easy to get started with the Amazon Polly Free Tier, try it today.

You are billed monthly for the number of characters of text that you processed. Amazon Pollys Standard voices are priced at $4.00 per 1 million characters for speech or Speech Marks requests . Amazon Pollys Neural voices are priced at $16.00 per 1 million characters for speech or Speech Marks requested .

For Amazon Pollys Standard voices, the free tier includes 5 million characters per month for speech or Speech Marks requests, for the first 12 months, starting from your first request for speech. For Neural voices, the free tier includes 1 million characters per month for speech or Speech Marks requests, for the first 12 months, starting from your first request for speech.

Simple Api Operations That Generate Lifelike Speech

Developer teams can leverage Amazon Polly’s API through SDKs or the CLI to build speech enabled applications. AWS users can also use the WordPress and Medium plug ins to create audio content for their blogs, pages and websites. The API returns the audio to your application as a stream so you can play the voices immediately.

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Setting Up Text To Speech Application Using Amazon Polly

Long back we usedAWS to set up a PHP and MYSQL application. This weekend will work with to deploy our own TTS application.

Amazon Polly is a Text-to-Speech service that uses advanced deep learning technologies to synthesize speech that sounds like a human voice.

This article is heavily based on theguide on AWS. Our application architecture looks as below:

Let us start building the application where we will set up a few lambda functions, SNS, and S3 bucket to finally result in RESTful APIs that can convert text to speech for us.

Create a DynamoDB Table

Create a DynamoDBtable to store text and corresponding audio files.

Create an S3 Bucket

Create an S3bucket that will hold all the audio files for you. Go through the Create bucketwizard to complete the process.

Create a SNS Topic

The work of converting a text file to an audio output would be done by 2 Lambda functions. Lets create a new SNS topic from the SNS console.

Create a New Role

Create a new Rolein the IAM Console.

After choosing the service that will use this role, go ahead and give this Rolea name and click on Create Role.

After the Roleis created, click on Add inline policyunder the Permissionstab.

Copy paste the following policy, which provides Lambda with access to the services included in the architecture diagram

  ]}

After adding the JSON, review the policy and name it.

Creating a New Post Lambda Function

Copy paste the following code for it:

Assign the IAM role that we created for the Lambda functions.

How Amazon Polly Powers Trinity Player

One of the products we have been working on is an audio player that a user can integrate into a web page, and translate all the text into audio . The player uses Amazon Polly and its neural net, in particular, to read the texts out loud in a pleasant voice. Or you can adjust the setting, and make the tone more dramatics with breaking news reading style.

Some of the cool Trinity Player features include the ability to translate texts into different languages, display advertising , plus some additional perks. For instance, to effectively incorporate advertising we use speech marks. These let us estimate when the new sentence begins so that we can incorporate an audio ad without breaking up a sentence.

Since we are also using Amazon for a multitude of tasks , I always have to pay careful attention to my code quality. Or else a sloppy bug can eat up your entire testing budget in one blink :).

Trinity Player is a cool product, but its more tricky than you might think. I mean, yeah, it looks like an audio player with a 70px UI, how complicated it can be?

But you constantly need to solve a lot of challenging tasks from a technical standpoint. The product does not have SPA, React, Angular or any other fancy framework. This forces you to think out of the box and work with everything at hand: OM, CSS selectors, postMessage, audio, NodeJS, DB , CICD, testing, Docker, etc.

We also spend a great deal of time testing the app .

Alex

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Working Of Amazon Polly

Amazon Polly converts input text into life-like speech. We can call one of the speech synthesis methods, provide the text that you want to synthesize, choose one of the Neural Text-to-Speech or Standard Text-to-Speech voices, and specify an audio output format. Amazon Polly then synthesizes the provided text into a high-quality speech audio stream.

Input text Provide the text that you want to synthesize, and Amazon Polly returns an audio stream. You can provide the input as plain text or in Speech Synthesis Markup Language format. With SSML you can control various aspects of speech, such as pronunciation, volume, pitch, and speech rate.

Output format Amazon Polly can deliver synthesized speech in multiple formats. You can select the audio format that suits your needs. For example, you might request the speech in the MP3 or Ogg Vorbis format for consumption by web and mobile applications. Or, you might request the PCM output format for consumption by AWS IoT devices and telephony solutions.

Reference-

How Do I Enable Polly On Amazon

If you want to get Polly to work on Amazon, the process is relatively straightforward. You need to create a user account for the Amazon Web Services client. Once you have an AWS account set up, you simply need to sign in to the management console and open up the IAM area to get your user account going. You should be able to access the features tied to the tier you paid for there. If you are looking for a program that is easier to use, consider making the move to Speechify.

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Voice And Language Options

Amazon launched Polly in November 2016 with 47 natural sounding voices across 24 languages. Today you can synthesize speech using any of the 68 male and female voices across 24 languages and accents.

There are two types of voices – Standard TTS voices and Neural TTS voices.

Standard TTS voices use concatenative synthesis, which involves stringing together the phonemes of recorded speech.

Neural TTS voices are generated by a two-part system that emphasize frequency characteristics that are unique to human speech. NTTS also has a newscaster style for narration based use cases.

The Globe And Mails Audio Now

One of those publishers is The Globe and Mail. It is one of Canadas most-read print and digital newspapers. The Globe and Mail has used Amazon Polly in particular to increase user engagement.According to Greg Doufas, the Chief Technical and Digital Officer at The Globe and Mail, the newspaper has used Amazon Polly in its overall effort to help consumers access and engage with the Globe and Mails award-winning journalism.Its product is called Audio Now, which leverages Amazon Polly Newscaster. According to Doufas, Audio Now is a first for Canada.The Globe and Mail readers can access Audio Now by simply clicking on a story that interests them. Because Canada is a multilingual country, The Globe and Mail offers Audio Now in versions of English and French.

That said, because the newspaper attracts a global audience, stories are also available in Chinese Mandarin. Yes, The Globe and Mails Audio Now product is on the newer side. However, it is already changing the way that Globe and Mail readers consume content.

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Why Amazon Polly Is A Potential Game Changer For The Publishing Industry

Esra Celebi

The way that consumers interact with content is changing. We are in the middle of a paradigm shift in which consumers are increasingly consuming video and audio content. However, one of the most exciting developments in the audio world is text-to-speech technology. To be clear, this isnt exactly a new technology. Text-to-speech has existed for more than two decades. Nevertheless, it hasnt yet caught on in mainstream media because of its lack of natural and realistic modulation. Consumers felt the same way. For instance, news updates on smart speakers arent greatly loved because of their reliance on synthesised voices.That said, text-to-speech technology is set to make a large leap forward due to one company. That company is Amazon. changes everything because it is even closer to sounding like a human voice when reading text. The bottom line? Small and large publishers should pay attention to Amazon Polly, as it presents all kinds of exciting opportunities.If you want to know how the introduction of this article sounds with Amazon Polly, just listen in here:

Getting Started With Amazon Polly

Amazon Polly provides simple API operations that you can easily integrate with your existing applications. For a list of supported operations, seeActions. You can use either of the following options:

• AWS SDKs When using the SDKs, your requests to Amazon Polly are automatically signed and authenticated using the credentials you provide. This is the recommended choice for building your applications.

• AWS CLI You can use the AWS CLI to access any of Amazon Polly functionality without having to write any code.

The following sections describe how to get set up and provide an introductory exercise.

Topics

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Cons To Tts On Amazon

For many users, one of the main downsides will be the price. While there are numerous different subscription models, some can be quite pricey. Alexa is based on cloud computing technology, which means that you wont be able to use it without an internet connection or Wi-Fi.

Moreover, many text-to-speech apps will struggle with words from time to time, and Polly is no different. This doesnt mean that the app is bad, it just shows that there are other TTS options out there with higher speech output accuracy rates.

Finally, if you want to customize the app using the SSML, it might take you a while. The app is easy to use, and basic speech options are as simple as they can be. But if you want to change something on an advanced level, it wont be as simple.

Gannett Embraces Amazon Polly

Next to The Globe and Mail, Gannett has embraced Amazon Polly.

Services like Amazon Polly and features like its Newscaster voice help us deliver breaking news and original reporting with increased speed and fidelity worthy of our brands.

Scott Stein, VP of Content Ventures at Gannett

You can see how useful Amazon Polly would be in a breaking-news environment. With news changing by the second, journalists simply dont have the time to go into a recording booth and record a voiceover of their story. The situation is different with Amazon Polly. By using Amazon Polly, journalists can spend more time breaking and reporting the news instead of a task that can be automated.

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Building A Reliable Text

This is a guest post by Yiannis Philipopoulos, a Software Developer at Bandwidth. In Yiannis words: Bandwidths solutions are shaping the future of how we connect with voice and messaging for mobile apps and large-scale, enterprise-level solutions. At the core of Bandwidths business-grade Communications Platform as a Service offering are communication APIs that allow companies to launch and scale next-generation apps and solutions using the nations largest VoIP network.

Text-to-speech technology is evolving rapidly. Thanks to machine learning, computers ability to disambiguate text and combine individual sounds into natural-sounding whole words has improved dramatically. Although Amazon Polly provides excellent TTS at low cost, many still use older TTS technologies because they believe that upgrading to a new system isnt worth the effort.

Bandwidths customers use TTS primarily to vocalize menus, reminders, and order information. Bandwidths API lets customers quickly purchase telephone numbers, send texts, make calls, and, create static or dynamic voice messages. In this post, I show how Bandwidth integrated Amazon Polly to provide on-demand TTS capabilities. I also offer some simple suggestions for leveraging Amazon Pollys ability to cache results.

Unbeatable Price For Aws Customers

AWS free tier users get five million characters free every month for the first year. This is an irresistible offer for existing AWS users looking for TTS services to access high quality voices. With Polly, Amazonâs strength in cloud management combines with on-demand audio streaming to download, store and redistribute speech. Amazon Polly has a pay-as-you-go model that charges only for text synthesized, which users find cheaper and more efficient.

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This Amazon Polly Alternative Has 4 Dream Features For Every Content Creator

Amazon Polly is a cloud-based service that converts text into lifelike speech. It produces natural sounding speech using advanced deep learning technologies. Over the last couple of years, text to speech has found mainstream acceptance in entertainment , marketing , contact centres , assistive apps and devices, and personal voice assistants like Siri and Hey Google. Services like Amazon Polly make high quality voices through speech synthesis accessible and affordable, they also offer real time speech generation. TTS has created entirely new categories of human-AI interactions through read-aloud applications, live translation and speech synchronized facial animation.

In this article we cover how Amazon Polly works, its key features, what itâs great and not so great for, and 4 features every content creator needs for the perfect voiceover.

How Can The Amazon Polly Tts Service Be Installed

You must execute a sequence of commands with a bootstrap package to install Polly’s TTS Service on your machine. To make the TTS service compatible with the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, bootstrap must run. To do this, go to AWS CodeStar, click “Add a New Service,” and then choose the necessary bootstrap service.

You must download the AWS plugin for Windows to install Amazon Polly on Windows. Additionally, you must run the AmazonPollyForWindowsSetup.exe file after unzipping the downloaded folder to run the program. Then, you can change your system’s speech settings using the control panel. You may carry out similar operations on iOS and other operating systems.

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