8 ms·
Amazon Polly – Text to Speech in 47 Voices and 24 Languages
- devoply 10y agoDid they use ivona for this? Probably. Ivona Amy is awesome1
- jakozaur 10y agoAlmost sure about that they used ivona. Even name suggest the location of their office Polly -> Poland.
- typicalrunt 10y agoThat'd be quite witty of them. Polly would normally map to being a parrot, repeating whatever was told to it.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- cypher543 10y agoThe link to the Polly service console is broken. Polly doesn't even show up in the list of services on my AWS account.
- deanclatworthy 10y agoSame. I'm sure this will roll out to us all in the coming hours.
- mistermann 10y agoHope someone can post an audio clip for those of us lacking an account, curious to see how this sounds!
- danso 10y agoHere's an example from a German male speaker: http://data.danwin.com/aws-polly-german.mp3 http://data.danwin.com/aws-polly-german.mp3
- pschael 10y agothe german polly voices are the same as IVONA voices: http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/ivona/static//media/new/Hans.mp3 http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/ivona/static//med... I hoped there would be new & better german voices
- nieksand 10y agoScroll down a bit here and you'll ten different example voices: https://aws.amazon.com/polly/ https://aws.amazon.com/polly/ English male sounds surprisingly bad. English female is better.
- cypher543 10y agoThat's pretty common among TTS services and engines. Most people want a female voice for their personal assistant/ebook reader/whatever, so the male voices don't seem to get as much tuning. As someone who happens to prefer a male voice on my apps, it's a little frustrating.
- ghaff 10y agoI don't know how much is tuning and how much is personal preference but I plugged in some different texts and I'd probably default to Amy (English, British).
- tmountain 10y agoAudio examples are available here: https://aws.amazon.com/polly/ https://aws.amazon.com/polly/
- Mizza 10y agoThey don't sound great to me. I was hoping to build a service around this, but hearing the quality there.. meh. Cheaper to use `say`. It'd be tolerable to hear a voice-interface with this, but it'd be maddening to try to listen to a book this way.
- beagle3 10y agoCheck the license on 'say' before you use it commercially. There are restrictions.
- alblue 10y agoDo you have a reference to the restrictions of what is prodced by "say"? Just because a tool may be GPL does not mean that its product need be (c.f. gcc)
- beagle3 10y agoFrom Page 2 of http://images.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macOS1012.pdf http://images.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macOS1012.pdf : > F. Voices. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, you may use the system voices included in the Apple Software (“System Voices”) (i) while running the Apple Software and (ii) to create your own original content and projects for your personal, non-commercial use. No other use of the System Voices is permitted by this License, including but not limited to the use, reproduction, display, performance, recording, publishing or redistribution of any of the System Voices in a profit, non-profit, public sharing or commercial context. Which truly sucks, because they don't even give you the option to pay for such use.
- josho 10y agoYou must not care about the english voices then, as the result from 'say' is terrible compared to the amazon male or female english voice.
- anotheryou 10y agoI wonder why they pulled the Ivona text2speech android app. I'm still happily using it. It's quite comfortable to listen to articles in pocket while on the train (and to keep listening while changing trains). edit: ah it was just the german version that is not available any more, english one seems to be still the store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ivona.tts https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ivona.tts
- nitrogen 10y agoIn the US I get "Sorry! This content is not available in your country yet." Interesting.
- webwanderings 10y agoDoes anyone know if NPR recently used this (or something similar) recently, on a story? I recall listening to a story in my car (hardly paying attention) and the person narrating the story, sounded unusual. I thought it is probably computer generated but I couldn't tell for sure. I guess the general public better get ready to tell the difference?
- jawns 10y ago> "I can't embed sound clips in this post" You can read this as: We're pleased to announce our really cool TTS feature that took a lot of engineering know-how and effort ... but you'll have to click through, because we can't seem to get around the limitations of our CMS to embed audio content in a blog post.
- jpdlla 10y agoI wonder if they support speech marks like Ivona, for allowing synchronization of text with audio, useful for text highlighting.
- caio1982 10y agoI tried a few random sentences and some articles paragraphs with both Vitória and Ricardo (Brazilian Portuguese voices) and Ricardo did pretty well. I was impressed, really. Vitória on the other hand was not much better (as in "fluent", with rhythm and right intonation) than other available female voices out there for pt_BR. EDIT: oh, I had no idea they have used Ivona
- mrfusion 10y agoDoes aws offer a speech recognition service too?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- lljk_kennedy 10y agohttps://aws.amazon.com/lex/ https://aws.amazon.com/lex/
- canthonytucci 10y agoI need the inverse of this is anyone selling that?
- asamarin 10y agoI don't know about Amazon, but Google does have Cloud Speech API; seems to be what you're looking for: https://cloud.google.com/speech/ https://cloud.google.com/speech/
- lljk_kennedy 10y agoAmazon Lex: https://aws.amazon.com/lex/ https://aws.amazon.com/lex/
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- iagooar 10y agoIf you have a podcast, at https://www.podigee.com https://www.podigee.com we're about to launch a beta transcription service that is integrated into the podcast publishing workflow. Drop me a line if you want a beta invite for the feature.
- primitivesuave 10y agoWish we had seen this a few days ago before dropping funds on a human to record for us. I played with several different voices and ran it on a text corpus that we gave to the human, and in some cases I would say this even sounds better. Computer generated voices feel most robotic when their intonation of a word is abnormal or their pauses between words make the sentence feel choppy. The intonation and natural pauses between words is very good for all of the main voices. The Japanese voice Mizuki was the most comical addition, since I can't think of a real situation where she would ever actually be used. Mizuki speaks Engarish (the Japanese version of English) beautifully, but any Japanese person who can understand Engarish will also understand English. Also, Mizuki doesn't add the correct vowel ending to all words, e.g. she correctly says "cheezu" for "cheese", but says "steku" instead of "steki" for "steak".
- aninhumer 10y ago>any Japanese person who can understand Engarish will also understand English. My impression is that it's actually quite common for Japanese people to understand Japanese accented English more easily than a native English speaker. >she correctly says "cheezu" for "cheese", but says "steku" instead of "steki" for "steak". "Suteeku" sounds like what a Japanese person who knows English well but has a strong accent might say. "Suteeki" is more of a corrupted loanword.
- giovannibajo1 10y agoI would say it's true in general for us non native speakers to understand other non native speakers better than native speakers (unless their English is so garbled that becomes too hard...). But it's even more especially true for English pronounced by people born in our own country; that's the easiest by a far amount
- primitivesuave 10y ago> My impression is that it's actually quite common for Japanese people to understand Japanese accented English more easily than a native English speaker. This is actually very true, made me think back to many situations in Japan where adding a strong Japanese accent to my English words made it comprehensible to the listener (just as adding a Japanese accent to the generated speech makes it nearly incomprehensible to a non-Japanese speaker).
- cypher543 10y agoOne thing I wish more services like this offered is non-speech sounds. CereVoice, for example, lets you insert laughs, coughs, sighs, etc and it can really enhance the output in some cases. Google's WaveNet also manages to simulate the catching of one's breath during particularly long utterances, although I realize it uses a completely different technique (neural net vs. concatenative synthesis). My biggest problem with CereVoice, though, has been its terrible web API. It doesn't support streaming output, so it renders the audio to an Amazon S3 bucket and then returns a URL, which is pretty inconvenient (and slow). You have to do the same for transcripts, too. So, if you want everything, you have to make 3 separate HTTP requests and parse 2 XML documents for one round of synthesis. IBM Watson's TTS API gets it right, imo. Its streaming mode returns audio frames and transcripts over a WebSocket connection.
- qsun 10y agoI was trying to figure out an affordable way to send "Read Later" articles in voice to mobile device, either as podcast or other format, to keep myself relevant while driving to/from office. I realized this tool might not be cheap, since it may take the voice actor/actress 2 hours per day to produce my content (2-hour driving commuting per day for me). To get familiar local accent, it costs ~$36 in Australia, and maybe slightly cheaper for US accent. The value it brings me can hardly justify the cost. Now, with Polly, things changed - it produces reasonable voice, and 2-hour content would only cost ~$0.3. I decided to launch my service as soon as Instapaper approves my API request. At the same time, put your email here: http://readlater.launchrock.co/ http://readlater.launchrock.co/
- bckmn 10y agoI've built this here: https://narro.co https://narro.co (I haven't built into the Polly voices yet, but it uses Ivona currently, Polly's precursor.)
- bckmn 10y agoWe just released options for all the available Polly voices this morning!
- istjohn 10y agoMy Android Instapaper app does text-to-voice, and I thought their iPhone app did, too.
- r3bl 10y agoPocket also has that feature implemented on Android. EDIT: It is robot-like and nowhere near the quality of the samples that Amazon provided, but it gets the job done.
- fillskills 10y agoPocket has this on its apps. The voice quality is very robotic though
- olegkikin 10y agoAfter that WaveNet speech synthesis demo, none of these sound even remotely good. https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio/ https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio...
- codecamper 10y agoAmazon vs Google for tech. Does Amazon really stand a chance?
- Cerium 10y agoDifferent optimizations. WaveNet (depending on hardware and configuration) takes hours to tens of hours per second of audio, but sounds really good. Polly can create audio faster than you can listen to it.
- rjbwork 10y agoThere's already a well known .NET library called Polly that's under the purview of the .NET Foundation. See http://www.thepollyproject.org/ http://www.thepollyproject.org/ This could get a bit confusing for some folks.
- Hansi 10y agoSurprised that Icelandic is being offered. As a native Icelandic speaker; to me it sounds about as good as can be expected with such a service. Isochrony (had to search the dictionary for that one) is a bit off but expected based on the context of phrases / words used to create the samples.
- cyberferret 10y agoJust me, or do the foreign voices sound much more realistic than the English speaking ones do? It could be the fact that I am not a native speaker of Icelandic, French etc. so perhaps to a native speaker, it may still seem robotic and sterile, but to me, the inflections and cadence sounds much more natural in the non English synthetic speech.
- ghaff 10y agoThe French sounds a bit flat to me but I could easily mistake it for a somewhat bored human reading in mostly a monotone. But I certainly don't know French well enough to be sensitive to unnatural pauses or odd inflections. It really is quite good--even if I really wouldn't want to read an entire book read this way or would mistake it for a human. It definitely gets me thinking about ways to use this service.
- aecing 10y agoseems like a great opportunity for a tool to aide in learning pronunciation of foreign languages
- archagon 10y agoThis sounds better than OSX text-to-speech for audiobook purposes, but the 1500 character limit per API call is annoying. Instead of sending the ebook text in full, I have to split by paragraph and (occasionally) sentence and then stitch everything back together with manually inserted pauses, making the audio a bit uneven.