use-all-polly-voices-with-lang-tag

Will show you how to use all available Amazon Polly voices for your specific language/country. This will help you to create 50+ personas with unique voices for your immersive Alexa skills.

Background

Amazon announced the public availability of Amazon Polly voices for Alexa skills in October 2018 (1). There are currently 58 Polly voices available (2).

The Polly voices can be used within any SSML speak text for speakOutput as well as reprompt:

<voice name="Brian">Hello, this is Brian speaking. How are you doing today?</voice>

See? Pretty easy to use!

But some languages only have one or two voices. I needed a few more individual voices for an Alexa skill I wrote. So I was looking for a way around the limitation.

Solution

In order to create more personas for your skill with an individual voice, you can use all the Polly voices available worldwide. It's easy, because there is something called...

... the tag (3)! The tag can be used within an SSML to make sure Alexa is using a language specific pronunciation. But this can also be used to let other Polly voices speak another language, with an accent (4). For example you can use a French Polly voice to talk American English with a Frech accent. How? I will show you.

<voice name="Celine"><lang xml:lang="en-US">Hi, my name is Celine. Nice to meet you, Brian. How are your doing, Brian?</lang></voice>

Want to try it out? Visit this page and login to your account: https://eu-west-1.console.aws.amazon.com/polly/home/SynthesizeSpeech

1. Choose "SSML" tab

2. Switch to French and choose voice "Celine"

3. Enter the following SSML: <speak><lang xml:lang="en-US">Hello, my name is Celine. Nice to meet you Brian. How are you?</lang></speak>

4. Listen to your SSML via push on the blue button.

5. Enjoy!

Easy as that. Now, get back your skill and use Polly voices. Check out my other repo to see how to use polly voices with background music! It's also pretty easy!

(1): https://developer.amazon.com/blogs/alexa/post/baee53c1-5b03-4580-b57a-ee9510413354/amazon-polly-voices-in-alexa-skills-now-generally-available

(2): https://docs.aws.amazon.com/en_us/polly/latest/dg/voicelist.html

(3): https://developer.amazon.com/docs/custom-skills/speech-synthesis-markup-language-ssml-reference.html#lang

(4): https://docs.aws.amazon.com/en_us/polly/latest/dg/supported-ssml.html#lang-tag