analyst Holger Mueller said the Amazon Polly updates show that all of the major platform-as-a-service companies are getting serious about chatbots and conversational interfaces in general, since these platforms are quickly revolutionizing customer and employee experiences. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland) AWS regions.Ĭonstellation Research Inc. The voices all work in real time and in batch mode, and can be accessed from Amazon’s US East (N. Here’s a quick demo of the newscaster voice: Īmazon said the newscaster style is available in two English voices, while Neural-Text-To-Speech is available in 11, including three U.K. The feature has also been introduced to Amazon Alexa-enabled devices, where it’s used to narrate daily news briefings and similar content. Simon said organizations including The Globe and Mail, Encyclopedia Britannica and TIM Media are already using Polly’s newscaster style. “What about style? For sure, human ears can tell the difference between a newscast, a sportscast, a university class and so on indeed, most humans adopt the right style of speech for the right context, and this certainly helps in getting their message across.” “Speech quality is certainly important, but more can be done to make a synthetic voice sound even more realistic and engaging,” Simon said. Using Neural-Text-To-Speech’s underlying algorithm, Amazon created its second new feature, which is a newscaster-style voice that makes narration sound “even more realistic” when reading news articles and similar content, AWS evangelist Julien Simon wrote in a blog post. Here’s an example of a Neural Text-To-Speech voice in action:

New supplementary data can be added as desired to create various additional speaking styles.

That model works by combining large amounts of standard, neutral speech with just a few hours of additional voice data in the target speaking style. One of the great things about Neural Text-To-Speech is that it’s able to learn new speaking styles with just a few hours of training, thanks to a new artificial intelligence model that Amazon wrote about in a research paper last year. The first of the new features is called Neural Text-To-Speech, which Amazon says delivers “significant improvements” in speech quality by boosting the “naturalness” and “expressiveness” of synthesized voices. is taking on Google LLC in human voice replication, adding two new features today to Amazon Polly, a cloud-based service that transforms text into lifelike speech and is used to create applications that can talk.

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