Amazon Polly

Amazon Polly’s text-to-speech (TTS) capabilities make it easy to convert a written post to a lifelike, professionally-sounding audio version. In this brief post, we will learn how to use Amazon Polly to convert blog posts to audio.

Amazon Polly offers the ability to use custom lexicons, or vocabularies. According to AWS, you can modify the pronunciation of particular words, such as company names, acronyms, foreign words, and neologisms.

If you write industry-specific or highly technical blogs, you will find creating a lexicon is probably necessary to ensure your accompanying audio sounds accurate.

Lexicons must conform to the Pronunciation Lexicon Specification (PLS) W3C recommendation. The lexicon files are in XML format.

Amazon Polly supports synthesizing speech from either plain text or SSML input.

From the Amazon Polly’s Management Console, copy and paste your post’s prepared text into the ‘Plain text’ tab.

Next, choose the Voice Engine.

If you are using English, I suggest ‘Neural’.

 According to AWS, Amazon Polly has a Neural TTS (NTTS) system that can produce even higher quality voices than its standard voices.

 The NTTS system produces the most natural and human-like text-to-speech voices possible.

 Choose your Language and Region.

 Then, select your Voice.

 Lastly, upload your lexicon file(s).

To start the process, choose ‘Synthesize to S3’.

Indicate the S3 bucket you would like the mp3 format audio file, output into.

You can also add a prefix to the mp3 files. For most average length posts, the text synthesis process takes less than one minute.

Select ‘Synthesize’.

Polly creates a synthesis task.

The synthesis tasks may be viewed from the ‘S3 synthesis tasks’ tab.

Once the synthesis task is complete, the resulting mp3 audio file may be viewed and downloaded from the S3 Management Console.

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