AWS Machine Learning Blog

Category: Amazon Polly

Empowering wheelchair users with a socially assistive robot running on Amazon Machine Learning

Loro is a socially assistive robot that helps users with physical limitations to more robustly experience their worlds by assisting with seeing, sensing, speaking, and interacting with surroundings.  Loro uses a range of AWS artificial intelligence (AI) and especially machine learning (ML) services to enable its broad range of use cases. Wheelchair users and others […]

Amazon Polly adds Arabic language support

On April 17th, 2019 Amazon Polly launched an Arabic female text-to-speech (TTS) voice called Zeina. This voice is clear and natural-sounding. The voice masters tongue twisters, and it can whisper, just like all other Amazon Polly products. Let’s hear Zeina introduce herself: Listen now Voiced by Amazon Polly Hello, my name is Zeina, I am the […]

Machine learning: What’s in it for government?

Machine learning (ML) allows governments to deliver better, more cost-effective, and citizen-friendly services. We talked with three Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers from government authorities and institutes who shared their stories about how ML helped them transform their services and their organizations. These customers gathered at an executive learning track curated particularly for European Government […]

How simpleshow uses Amazon Polly to voice stories in their explainer videos

More than ten years ago, simpleshow started to help their customers explain materials, ideas, and products by using three-minute animated explainer videos. These explainer videos use two hands and simple, black and white illustration to lead viewers through a story. Today, the company also provides mysimpleshow.com, a platform that allows anyone to produce high-quality explainer […]

Amazon Polly adds Italian and Castilian Spanish voices, and Mexican Spanish language support

Amazon Polly is an AWS service that turns text into lifelike speech. This pre-trained service requires no machine learning skills to easily integrate AI into your applications. In addition to the previously available Italian voices Carla and Giorgio, we have now added a second female Italian voice. Listen to the introduction by Bianca. Listen now Voiced […]

AWS expands HIPAA eligible machine learning services for healthcare customers

Today, AWS announced that Amazon Translate, Amazon Comprehend, and Amazon Transcribe are now U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) eligible services. This announcement adds to the number of AWS artificial intelligence services that are already HIPAA eligible– Amazon Polly, Amazon SageMaker, and Amazon Rekognition. By using these services, AWS customers in […]

Beyond text: How Spokata uses Amazon Polly to make news and information universally accessible as real-time audio

Just as television transitioned from black and white to color, the web has been moving from a text-based medium to one dominated by sound and vision. Accordingly, content creation has both exploded and changed. Publishers of all types are struggling through this transition as they try to meet the demands of users while keeping their business models intact.

On-demand audio is attracting significant interest from publishers as mobile listening grows and in-car technology begins to disrupt traditional radio. This trend is most visible in the mainstream adoption of podcasts. But podcasts are just the beginning of a rapidly emerging, and diverse, ecosystem of new digital audio formats. Amazon Echo and advanced text-to-speech services such as Amazon Polly are enabling the creation of these new audio products.

In this blog post we describe how Spokata leverages these Amazon technologies to make text-based news and information universally accessible as real-time audio.

Meet Zhiyu—the first Mandarin Chinese voice for Amazon Polly

Amazon Polly is a fully managed service that turns text into lifelike speech. We’re excited to announce the support for Mandarin Chinese in Amazon Polly. Zhiyu is a clear, bright, and natural-sounding female voice. Let’s hear Zhiyu introduce herself. Click the play button to listen now: Listen now Voiced by Amazon Polly Zhiyu introduces herself in […]

Announcing the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Hackathon: Build Intelligent Applications using machine learning APIs and serverless

Amazon Web Services (AWS) brings image and video analysis, natural language processing, speech recognition, text-to-speech, and machine translation within the reach of every developer. With machine learning (ML) services by AWS, you can plug in prebuilt AI functionality into your apps without having to worry about ML models. Thousands of developers have used Amazon ML […]