Step 2.2: Getting started exercise using the Amazon CLI - Amazon Polly
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Step 2.2: Getting started exercise using the Amazon CLI

Now you can test the speech synthesis offered by Amazon Polly. In this exercise, you call the SynthesizeSpeech operation by passing in sample text. You can save the resulting audio as a file and verify its content.

  1. Run the synthesize-speech Amazon CLI command to synthesize sample text to an audio file (hello.mp3).

    The following Amazon CLI example is formatted for Unix, Linux, and macOS. For Windows, replace the backslash (\) Unix continuation character at the end of each line with a caret (^) and use full quotation marks (") around the input text with single quotes (') for interior tags.

    aws polly synthesize-speech \
    --output-format mp3 \
    --voice-id Joanna \
    --text 'Hello, my name is Joanna. I learned about the W3C on 10/3 of last year.' \
    hello.mp3

    In the call to synthesize-speech, you provide sample text for the synthesis, the voice to use (by providing a voice ID, explained in the following step 3), and the output format. The command saves the resulting audio to the hello.mp3 file.

    In addition to the MP3 file, the operation sends the following output to the console.

    {
        "ContentType": "audio/mpeg", 
        "RequestCharacters": "71"
}

  2. Play the resulting hello.mp3 file to verify the synthesized speech.

  3. Get the list of available voices by using the DescribeVoices operation. Run the following describe-voices Amazon CLI command.

    aws polly describe-voices

    In response, Amazon Polly returns the list of all available voices. For each voice, the response provides the following metadata: voice ID, language code, language name, and the gender of the voice. The following is a sample response.

    {
    "Voices": [
        {
            "Gender": "Female",
            "Name": "Salli",
            "LanguageName": "US English",
            "Id": "Salli",
            "LanguageCode": "en-US",
            "SupportedEngines": [
                "neural",
                "standard"
            ]
        },
        {
            "Gender": "Female",
            "Name": "Danielle",
            "LanguageName": "US English",
            "Id": "Danielle",
            "LanguageCode": "en-US",
            "SupportedEngines": [
                "long-form"
            ]
        }
    ]
}

    Optionally, you can specify the language code to find the available voices for a specific language. Amazon Polly supports dozens of voices. The following example lists all the voices for Brazilian Portuguese.

    aws polly describe-voices \
    --language-code pt-BR

    For a list of language codes, see Languages Supported by Amazon Polly. These language codes are W3C language identification tags (ISO 639 code for the language name-ISO 3166 country code). For example, en-US (US English), en-GB (British English), and es-ES (Spanish), etc.

    You can also use the help option in the Amazon CLI to get the list of language codes:

    aws polly describe-voices help