Category: Amazon Polly

Voice-powered experiences are gaining traction and customer love. Volley is at the cutting edge of voice-controlled entertainment with its series of popular smart-speaker games, and many aspects of Volley rely on Amazon Polly. Every day, more and more people switch on lights, check the weather, and play music not by pushing buttons but with verbal […]

Listening to your Microsoft Word documents as audio is a great way to save time or to be productive on a long commute. You can easily convert an entire block of text into MP3 format with Amazon Polly. But you can vastly improve your listening experience with just a few simple steps. In this blog […]

Loro is a socially assistive robot that helps users with physical limitations to more robustly experience their worlds by assisting with seeing, sensing, speaking, and interacting with surroundings.  Loro uses a range of AWS artificial intelligence (AI) and especially machine learning (ML) services to enable its broad range of use cases. Wheelchair users and others […]

On April 17th, 2019 Amazon Polly launched an Arabic female text-to-speech (TTS) voice called Zeina. This voice is clear and natural-sounding. The voice masters tongue twisters, and it can whisper, just like all other Amazon Polly products. Let’s hear Zeina introduce herself: Listen now Voiced by Amazon Polly Hello, my name is Zeina, I am the […]

Machine learning (ML) allows governments to deliver better, more cost-effective, and citizen-friendly services. We talked with three Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers from government authorities and institutes who shared their stories about how ML helped them transform their services and their organizations. These customers gathered at an executive learning track curated particularly for European Government […]

At the beginning of last year we announced an Amazon Polly plugin for WordPress. This plugin allows blog and website creators who are using WordPress to quickly and easily create audio versions of their posts, articles and websites. A few months later, we updated the plugin with the ability to quickly translate the content of […]

More than ten years ago, simpleshow started to help their customers explain materials, ideas, and products by using three-minute animated explainer videos. These explainer videos use two hands and simple, black and white illustration to lead viewers through a story. Today, the company also provides mysimpleshow.com, a platform that allows anyone to produce high-quality explainer […]

Amazon Polly is an AWS service that turns text into lifelike speech. This pre-trained service requires no machine learning skills to easily integrate AI into your applications. In addition to the previously available Italian voices Carla and Giorgio, we have now added a second female Italian voice. Listen to the introduction by Bianca. Listen now Voiced […]

Today, AWS announced that Amazon Translate, Amazon Comprehend, and Amazon Transcribe are now U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) eligible services. This announcement adds to the number of AWS artificial intelligence services that are already HIPAA eligible– Amazon Polly, Amazon SageMaker, and Amazon Rekognition. By using these services, AWS customers in […]

Just as television transitioned from black and white to color, the web has been moving from a text-based medium to one dominated by sound and vision. Accordingly, content creation has both exploded and changed. Publishers of all types are struggling through this transition as they try to meet the demands of users while keeping their business models intact.

On-demand audio is attracting significant interest from publishers as mobile listening grows and in-car technology begins to disrupt traditional radio. This trend is most visible in the mainstream adoption of podcasts. But podcasts are just the beginning of a rapidly emerging, and diverse, ecosystem of new digital audio formats. Amazon Echo and advanced text-to-speech services such as Amazon Polly are enabling the creation of these new audio products.

In this blog post we describe how Spokata leverages these Amazon technologies to make text-based news and information universally accessible as real-time audio.