Pollyzon


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Pollyzon in Action

Pollyzon Introduction

Hear Pollyzon


What is Pollyzon

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Pollyzon is a text to speech program that generates lifelike speech through Amazon's AI Polly service. Pollyzon is great for doing voiceovers for videos including business promotions, tutorials, websites, app development and many more applications. Quality, ease of use, speed and versatility are the benefits of using Pollyzon for generating text to speech audio with professional results.

Pollyzon is free to use, but you will need to create an AWS account to access the Polly service through Pollyzon. The Polly service from AWS is a pay-as-you-go service and not a subscription. This makes Pollyzon very economical to use!

Amazon details the Polly service as follows.

Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech, allowing you to create applications that talk, and build entirely new categories of speech-enabled products. Polly's Text-to-Speech (TTS) service uses advanced deep learning technologies to synthesize natural sounding human speech. With dozens of lifelike voices across a broad set of languages, you can build speech-enabled applications that work in many different countries.

In addition to Standard TTS voices, Amazon Polly offers Neural Text-to-Speech (NTTS) voices that deliver advanced improvements in speech quality through a new machine learning approach. Polly’s Neural TTS technology also supports two speaking styles that allow you to better match the delivery style of the speaker to the application: a Newscaster reading style that is tailored to news narration use cases, and a Conversational speaking style that is ideal for two-way communication like telephony applications.
Pollyzon provides an easy to use bridge to access the Polly service to create rich text to speech output for use in many applications. Pollyzon also speeds up your workflow. Hiring a voice actor to do voiceovers takes time and effort to get your audio ready for production. If you make changes to your script after the voice actor has done their job, you have to go back and redo the voiceover which is more time added to the process. With Pollyzon, you just make the change in the editor and regenerate the audio and in a matter of seconds and you are done!

Pollyzon lets you express yourself through Polly voices to achieve professional results. I have shown some of my videos made with Polly voices to people and asked them what they thought. They asked if I hired a professional voice actor for the video and they were very surprised to find out that they were listening to a neural AI voice from Polly and they could not distinguish it from a human voice!

In general, you want to enhance your text with Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML). SSML is your plain text with tags added to enhance how Polly should process the input for producing better results. The problem with SSML is that it is a messy thing for humans to deal with. For example, take the following poem.
Mary had a little lamb,
Its fleece was white as snow,
And every where that Mary went
The lamb was sure to go;
He followed her to school one day—
That was against the rule,
It made the children laugh and play,
To see a lamb at school.
Now let's add some SSML tags to the poem that would be sent to AWS Polly.
<speak><amazon:effect name="drc"><prosody rate="fast"><prosody volume="soft">Mary had a little lamb,
<prosody rate="x-slow"><prosody volume="loud">Its fleece was white as snow,</prosody></prosody>
And every where that Mary went
The lamb was sure to go;
<amazon:effect name="drc"><prosody rate="fast">He followed her to school one day—</prosody></amazon:effect>
That was against the rule,
<amazon:effect name="drc"><prosody volume="x-loud"><lang xml:lang="fr-FR">It made the children laugh and play,</lang></prosody></amazon:effect>
To see a lamb at school.
</prosody></prosody></amazon:effect></speak>
Pollyzon greatly reduces this complexity by transforming SSML into styles composed of attributes that can be applied to the text like a word processor applies styles. This is the great advantage Pollyzon provides.