What Is Amazon Polly? - Amazon Polly
Are You a First-time User of Amazon Polly?
Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

What Is Amazon Polly?

Amazon Polly is a cloud service that converts text into lifelike speech. You can use Amazon Polly to develop applications that increase engagement and accessibility. Amazon Polly supports multiple languages and includes a variety of lifelike voices, so you can build speech-enabled applications that work in multiple locations and use the ideal voice for your customers. With Amazon Polly, you only pay for the text you synthesize. You can also cache and replay Amazon Polly’s generated speech at no additional cost.

Amazon Polly offers many voice options, including: Long-form voices, which produce human-like, highly expressive, and emotionally adept voices, and Neural Text-to-Speech (NTTS) voices. These voices deliver ground-breaking improvements in speech quality through new machine learning technology, and offer the most natural and human-like text-to-speech voices possible. Neural TTS technology also supports a Newscaster speaking style that is tailored to news narration use cases.

Common use cases for Amazon Polly include, but are not limited to, mobile applications such as newsreaders, games, eLearning platforms, accessibility applications for visually impaired people, and the rapidly growing segment of Internet of Things (IoT).

Amazon Polly is certified for use with regulated workloads for HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996), and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

Some of the benefits of using Amazon Polly include:

  • High quality – Amazon Polly offers both new neural TTS and best-in-class standard TTS technology to synthesize the superior natural speech with high pronunciation accuracy (including abbreviations, acronym expansions, date/time interpretations, and homograph disambiguation).

  • Low latency – Amazon Polly ensures fast responses, which make it a viable option for low-latency use cases such as dialog systems.

  • Support for a large portfolio of languages and voices – Amazon Polly supports dozens of voices languages, offering male and female voice options for most languages. This number will continue to increase as we bring more neural voices online. US English voices Matthew and Joanna can also use the Neural Newscaster speaking style, similar to what you might hear from a professional news anchor.

  • Cost-effective – Amazon Polly's pay-per-use model means there are no setup costs. You can start small and scale up as your application grows.

  • Cloud-based solution – On-device TTS solutions require significant computing resources, notably CPU power, RAM, and disk space. These can result in higher development costs and higher power consumption on devices such as tablets, smart phones, and so on. In contrast, TTS conversion done in the Amazon Web Services Cloud dramatically reduces local resource requirements. This enables support of all the available languages and voices at the best possible quality. Moreover, speech improvements are instantly available to all end-users and do not require additional updates for devices.

Are You a First-time User of Amazon Polly?

If you are a first-time user of Amazon Polly, we recommend that you read the following sections in the listed order:

  1. How Amazon Polly works – This section introduces various Amazon Polly inputs and options that you can work with in order to create an end-to-end experience.

  2. Getting Started with Amazon Polly – In this section, you set up your account and test Amazon Polly speech synthesis.

  3. Example Applications – This section provides additional examples that you can use to explore Amazon Polly.