Amazon announced the general availability of Neural Text-To-Speech and newscaster style in Amazon Polly, its cloud service that converts text into speech.
As Amazon Web Services tech evangelist Julien Simon noted in a blog post, Neural Text-To-Speech delivers significant improvements in speech quality by increasing naturalness and expressiveness.
As for newscaster style, which makes narration sound “even more realistic” for content like news articles and blog posts, Simon says it was made possible by Neural Text-To-Speech’s underlying machine learning algorithms.
Thanks to Polly and the newscaster style, [listeners] … can enjoy articles read in a high-quality voice that sounds like what they might expect to hear on the TV or radio.
Newscaster style is available for two English voices, while Neural Text-To-Speech is available for 11 voices, including three U.S. English voices and eight U.S. English voices.
Both work in real time and in batch mode, and they are currently accessible in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland) AWS regions.
Up to 1 million characters for Neural Text-To-Speech voices per month are free for the first 12 months, starting from the first request for speech (standard or NTTS).
With Neural Text-To-Speech and newscaster style, Amazon is effectively going toe to toe with Google and Microsoft.