AWS introduces a Polly WordPress plug-in that can turn Blog Post into an Audio

Amazon Web Services has now introduced a new Amazon Polly WordPress Plugin that will give the blog a voice by generating audio versions of the post. The audio can be played once the blog post is saved or updated or it can be also accessed in the podcast form by using the Amazon Pollycast Service. The WordPress Plugin is designed by the managed WordPress platform provider WP Engine and Amazon’s AWS team with the help of Amazon’s text to speech Polly.

Amazon Polly uses the Machine Learning Technologies to provide more life-like speech. It understands the word “live” could be pronounced differently in different scenarios. For example “I live in the United States” and “Live from Saturday Night Live” both sound different even though if the spelling is the same. So this means that the blog post with the audio plugin with Amazon Polly will sound more natural. The Amazon Polly Speech Engine includes 47 female and male voices and it supports 24 languages. Amazon has added support for Korean and other 5 languages. Amazon Polly is now available in all AWS Regions in the Amazon Web Services Partition.

Amazon Polly Text to Speech is evolved in the coming years with timbre effect, whispering, dynamic range compression and speech marks. With all this voice technology advancements is the reason why Alexa sounds so natural. Alexa also learned whisper and change the pitch of the voice which is similar to Amazon Polly. Polly is not used the first time for the Word Press Plugin. It has already worked on turning text like RSS feeds, PDFs, News Articles, blog post and more in audio. Polly being accessible via the WordPress Plugin will get more exposure and will be accessible to a wider audience.

Users that are operating their own installation of Wordpress on their own infrastructure or on Amazon Web Services will be only available to use this plugin and it does need a bit of configuration. This will make it little challenging to use for people who don’t have hands-on technical knowledge about this. Once you have set up the WordPress Plugin with Amazon Polly the plugin will itself will make calls when the blog is saved or updated.

With the Amazon Polly WordPress Plugin, the user will have the flexibility to set different voices for a different paragraph or quoted text. But such options are not only available in Plugin for this you have to choose from the list of features provided by the Amazon Polly voices to narrate different paragraphs or line by using the plugin.

Podcasters will also provide range of features by Amazon Polly where the plugin includes a feature called PollyCast that will allow you to access iTunes category contact email, images and explicit content flag. The Amazon Polly Plugin is completely free to use but the features provided by the Amazon Polly is not. You will price on the number of characters in the speech request but note this that the AWS free tier allows 5 million characters per month free for the first year after you begin using the Amazon Polly.