To date, I have not been able to locate a comprehensive list of supported voices with embedded playable samples for Amazon Polly, as one might find for other TTS services, for example, Google Cloud Text-to-Speech.
I find myself previewing various Amazon Polly voices repeatedly.
So, instead of continuing to throw away my monthly character quotas on sampling the different voices, I decided to run the English voices through a sample and save them for future reference. Since I work with English, I ran through the samples in English and its variants.
Amazon Polly Voice Samples
The samples here showcase the English (and English variants) of Amazon Polly voices outlined in the table below:
This is only a subset of the supported languages. For more information on the latest voices and supported languages available for Amazon Polly, please visit the official product page, specifically, the Voices in Amazon Polly section.
Australian (en-AU)
Nicole
Olivia
Russell
British (en-GB)
Amy
Emma
Brian
Indian (en-IN)
Aditi
Raveena
US (en-US)
Ivy
Joanna
Kendra
Kimberly
Salli
Joey
Justin
Kevin
Matthew
Welsh (en-GB-WLS)
Geraint
Amazon Polly is not Free
As per the product page, Amazon Polly is not a free service but a 12 months free trial with quota limits for new AWS account.
With an AWS Account, you can use the provided UI or the CLI, and both options allow you to send up to 100,000 characters per request for processing. The high character limits per request and the availability of the web UI makes Amazon Polly an ideal first choice for any text to speech tasks.
Because the tooling makes turning text into speech so simple, you can quickly rack up charges. In short, you will incur usage costs if you are not careful.
Footnotes
About the Sample
You heard the sample in various Amazon Polly voices, and now you can’t stop thinking about it. You can find the book for free on Project Gutenberg.
The following is the excerpt used as the sample:
He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. And that was all his patrimony. His very paternity was obscure, although the village of Gavrillac had long since dispelled the cloud of mystery that hung about it. Those simple Brittany folk were not so simple as to be deceived by a pretended relationship which did not even possess the virtue of originality. When a nobleman, for no apparent reason, announces himself the godfather of an infant fetched no man knew whence, and thereafter cares for the lad’s rearing and education, the most unsophisticated of country folk perfectly understand the situation. And so the good people of Gavrillac permitted themselves no illusions on the score of the real relationship between Andre-Louis Moreau — as the lad had been named — and Quintin de Kercadiou, Lord of Gavrillac, who dwelt in the big grey house that dominated from its eminence the village clustering below.
Content Disclaimer
If you find any errors, feel free to let me know. Other than that, I can only say content can change at anytime so be sure to consult the official product page for the latest updates.
