Speech synthesis is a complex challenge. Simply reading each letter in a sentence doesn’t guarantee meaningful output. Text-to-speech applications face several common hurdles:
Homographs: Words spelled identically but pronounced differently. For example, “I live in Las Vegas” versus “This presentation broadcasts live from Las Vegas.”
Text Normalization: Deciphering abbreviations, acronyms, and units. For instance, “St.” could mean “Street” or “Saint.”
Text-to-Phoneme Conversion: Languages with complex mappings, like English, where words like “tough,” “through,” and “though” have similar spellings but different pronunciations based on context.
Foreign Words and Expressions: Handling terms like “déjà vu,” proper names like “François Hollande,” and slang such as “ASAP” or “LOL.”
Amazon Polly offers a solution that overcomes these challenges, allowing you to focus on building innovative text-to-speech applications without getting bogged down in interpretation issues.
Amazon Polly transforms text into lifelike speech, enabling you to create applications that communicate naturally and opening up new possibilities for speech-enabled products. As an Amazon AI service, Polly leverages advanced deep learning technologies to synthesize speech that sounds remarkably human. It currently boasts dozens of lifelike voices across over 20 languages, empowering you to build speech-enabled applications that work seamlessly in various countries.
In this workshop, you’ll build a basic serverless application using Amazon Polly to convert text to speech. The application features a simple user interface that accepts text input in multiple languages and converts it into audio files playable directly in web browsers.
While this workshop uses blog posts as an example, the application’s potential extends to various text types, such as:
Let’s embark on this exciting journey to explore text-to-speech technology with Amazon Polly!