What is Amazon Polly and How to use it?

Table of Contents

Introduction

Hello Everyone, Welcome to this post, Here I am going to tell you about What is Amazon Polly, How we can use it in a simple and easy way, I will tell you about it’s pricing under the Free Tier and beyond the Free Tier, What are the common use cases where you can use it, How we can take the Amazon Polly’s output to the next level and some suggestions for further reading on this topic, I hope you are excited, So, Let’s get started!

What is Amazon Polly?

Amazon Polly is a Machine Learning service available on AWS Cloud platform, It converts text into human-like speech, So you may refer to it as Text-to-speech service or TTS for short.

It consists of multiple voices in various languages with their native accents. This helps in building speech-enabled applications that work in multiple geographical locations.

And use the ideal voice for your customers that is close to the accent being used by the targeted audience.

Few of the Voices names are Joanna, Nicole, Amy, Cristiano, Aditi, Liv, Mia and many-many more.

Amazon Polly supports voices in Standard as well as Neural categories, Neural voices sounds more natural.

How we can use Amazon Polly?

The easiest way to use Amazon Polly is from the AWS Management Console.

Let’s see how to use Real-time Speech Synthesization using Amazon Polly and for this,

Go to Amazon Polly’s dashboard
Click on Text-to-Speech on the left-hand side
Now, Click on the Plain text tab in the center of the screen and type the text that you want to Synthesize
Under Engine type, Select Standard
Under Language and Region, Select English, US or Language, and Region of your choice
Select your desired Voice on the right side
Now, Click on Listen to speech button to hear the speech output
If you are satisfied you can download the speech as an MP3 file by clicking on the Download MP3 button

So, that’s how easy it is to convert Text-to-speech using Amazon Polly with few simple clicks. Let’s talk about it’s pricing.

Amazon Polly Pricing

Amazon Polly follows a pay-as-you-go model for pricing based on the number characters you convert into speech in a month.

Under Free Tier, You can synthesize 5 Million characters using Standard Voices and 1 Million Characters using Neural Voices without any cost every month for the first 12 months.

Beyond Free Tier, You can synthesize 1 Million characters using Standard Voices at a cost of just $4 and 1 Million Characters using Neural Voices at a cost of $16 only.

Pricing may vary based upon the region that you select, So for accurate pricing for your AWS region please refer to this AWS pricing link related to it.

Amazon Polly Possible Use Cases

Amazon Polly can be used in many of the use cases where you need to generate professional voices at an affordable pricing.

For Example:

In Public Announcements: Like in Metro Announcements, Lost Kid or Lost Mobile Announcements at crowded places
In Generating Podcasts: You can use it in generating a weekly Podcast from your text

3. In Producing News: You can use Newscaster Speaking Style to deliver news in human-like voice

4. In Generating Audiobooks: You can use it’s Long Audio feature to convert an ebook into an Audiobook

5. In Radio Commercials: You can use it to create a Radio Commercial for your or your customer’s brand

Basically, Wherever you feel a need to produce high-quality human-like voices for your text without giving 1000s of dollars to a Voice-Over artist there you can use Amazon Polly’s Voices at an affordable price.

Taking Output of Amazon Polly to Next Level

So, You have synthesized your text into speech, Now, If you want to generate speech in multiple languages using voices with native accents, then you can translate the text from one language to another using Amazon Translate service and then synthesize that text in desired language and voice using Amazon Polly. That way you can deliver your content in multiple languages to your global audiences at very less prices and expand the footprint of your products.

Conclusion

Amazon Polly is very easy and affordable to use, anyone with some basic computer knowledge can learn to use it.

If you are interested in learning all of the great features that Amazon Polly offers then you can explore one of my courses related to this available on Udemy.com, I will show you how you can utilize it in a step-by-step manner from the AWS Management Console.