INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Now Alexa voice apps don&t have to sound like Alexa
Amazon today is offering a way for developers to give their voice apps a unique character with the launch of eight free voices to use in
skills, courtesy of the Amazon Polly service
The voices are only available in U.S
English, and include a mix of both male and female, according to Amazon Polly website.
Amazon Polly was firstintroducedat Amazon re:Invent
developer event in November 2016, and has been steadily ramping up its capabilities in the time since
Thetext-to-speechservice today is capable of things likewhispering, speech marks, using a timbre effect, and dynamic range compression & all
which make the voices sound more natural.
While the speech engine today supports a couple dozen languages, only the U.S
English voices are being offered to Alexa developers at this time.
But their addition could make some of Alexa skills more engaging &
especially those involving different characters, like an adventure story or game, for example.
Developers today may already be using
multiple voices in their skills, but the process of doing so is more cumbersome and rigid, as with mp3 file uploads.
To use an Amazon Polly
voice instead, developers would use Structured Speech Markup Language (SSML) and then specify which voice they want with the &voice name&
This makes it easier to adjust what is said, as developers could just change the text instead of having to re-record an mp3.
Amazon has been
working to make Polly more accessible to a wider audience, recently by offering a WordPress plugin that could turn your posts into
podcasts.
The new Alexa skills integration, meanwhile, gives Polly another avenue of reaching consumers
It also another means of competing with Alexa rival, Google Assistant
At Google developer conference last week, the company announced six new voices generated by Wavent, including one from singer John Legend
These will roll out later this year, and presumably, could make their way to the Assistant developer ecosystem as well.
