Amazon Polly Introduces Neural Text-To-Speech and Newscaster Style #TextToSpeech #Amazon @AWSCloud

Amazon announces on the AWS Blog that their Amazon Polly speech service now has a neural text-to-speech capability and a style of reading that sounds similar to how newscasters speak.

At AWS re:Invent 2016, we announced Polly, a managed service that turns text into lifelike speech, allowing customers to create applications that talk, and build entirely new categories of speech-enabled products. Zero machine learning expertise required: just call an API and get the job done! Since then, the team has regularly added new voices, for a current total of 29 languages and 59 voices.

Today, we’re happy to announce two major new features for Polly: Neural Text-To-Speech, and a groundbreaking newscaster style.

Introducing Neural Text-To-Speech (NTTS)
Through a new machine learning approach, NTTS delivers significant improvements in speech quality. It increases naturalness and expressiveness, two key factors in synthesizing lifelike speech that is getting closer than ever from human voices. Here’s an example of the quality you can expect.

Introducing the newscaster style

Speech quality is certainly important, but more can be done to make a synthetic voice sound even more realistic and engaging. What about style? For sure, human ears can tell the difference between a newscast, a sportscast, a university class and so on; indeed, most humans adopt the right style of speech for the right context, and this certainly helps in getting their message across.

The features are available today in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon) and Europe (Ireland). The free tier offers 1 million characters for NTTS voices per month for the first 12 months, starting from your first request for speech (standard or NTTS).

Read more on the blog and listen to samples of the new speech engines.