Tag Archives: Amazon Polly

New – Long-Form voices for Amazon Polly

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-long-form-voices-for-amazon-polly/

We are launching three new voices for Polly. Powered by a new long-form engine, the voices are natural and expressive, with appropriate pauses, emphasis, and tone.

New Voices
The new long-form voices are perfect for blog posts, news articles, training videos, and marketing content. The underlying Machine Learning model extracts meaning from the text, learning about speech segments, prosody (the pattern of rhythm and pauses), intonation, and other aspects of expressive speech, allowing the synthesized audio to express emotions, especially in dialogs. The new long-form engine uses a deep learning text-to-speech (TTS) model trained to acquire a contextual understanding of the text that allows it to express prosody in an appropriate way. This allows the intention of the story to drive the vocal performance and create the correct emphasis, pauses, and tones of a realistic human voice.

Here are the new voices:

Name Locale Gender Language Sample
Danielle en_US Female English (US)
Gregory en_US Male English (US)
Ruth en_US Female English (US)

Using the New Voices
You can access the new voices using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), or the AWS SDKs. Using the CLI, I start by listing the voices that use the new long-form engine:

$ aws --region us-east-1 polly describe-voices --output json \
  | jq -r '.Voices[] | select(.SupportedEngines | index("long-form")) | .Name'
Danielle
Gregory
Ruth

I can pick one, or I can try all of them:

for v in `aws polly describe-voices --output json \
          | jq -r '.Voices[] | select(.SupportedEngines | index("long-form")) | .Name'`; do
    Text="Hello my name is $v and I can read blog posts, articles, \
and other long-form content for you. I am the best\!"
    aws polly synthesize-speech --output-format 'mp3' \
    --text "$Text" --voice-id $v $v.mp3 --engine long-form; \
    aws s3 cp $v.mp3 s3://jbarr-voices; \
done

My shell script had a small quoting bug, but the resulting audio was too funny not to include!

Programmatically, you can reproduce my example by writing code that calls the DescribeVoices and SynthesizeSpeech functions.

Things to Know
Here are some interesting things that you should know about the new voices:

Pricing – Long-form voices are priced at $100 per million characters or Speech Marks requests. Check out the Amazon Polly Pricing page to learn more.

Engines & Voices – Some of the voices that I listed above can be used with more than one engine. For example, the Danielle voice can be used with the new long-form engine and the existing neural engine.

Regions – The new engine and voices are available in the US East (N. Virginia) Region.

Check out the new voices, build something awesome, and let me know what you think!

Jeff;

Week in Review – February 13, 2023

Post Syndicated from Sébastien Stormacq original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/week-in-review-february-13-2023/

AWS announced 32 capabilities since we published the last Week in Review blog post a week ago. I also read a couple of other news and blog posts.

Here is my summary.

The VPC section of the AWS Management Console now allows you to visualize your VPC resources, such as the relationships between a VPC and its subnets, routing tables, and gateways. This visualization was available at VPC creation time only, and now you can go back to it using the Resource Map tab in the console. You can read the details in Channy’s blog post.

CloudTrail Lake now gives you the ability to ingest activity events from non-AWS sources. This lets you immutably store and then process activity events without regard to their origin–AWS, on-premises servers, and so forth. All of this power is available to you with a single API call: PutAuditEvents. We launched AWS CloudTrail Lake about a year ago. It is a managed organization-scale data lake that aggregates, immutably stores, and allows querying of events recorded by CloudTrail. You can use it for auditing, security investigation, and troubleshooting. Again, my colleague Channy wrote a post with the details.

There are three new Amazon CloudWatch metrics for asynchronous AWS Lambda function invocations: AsyncEventsReceived, AsyncEventAge, and AsyncEventsDropped. These metrics provide visibility for asynchronous Lambda function invocations. They help you to identify the root cause of processing issues such as throttling, concurrency limit, function errors, processing latency because of retries, or missing events. You can learn more and have access to a sample application in this blog post.

Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) now supports AWS X-Ray to visualize, analyze, and debug applications. Developers can now trace messages going through Amazon SNS, making it easier to understand or debug microservices or serverless applications.

Amazon EC2 Mac instances now support replacing root volumes for quick instance restoration. Stopping and starting EC2 Mac instances trigger a scrubbing workflow that can take up to one hour to complete. Now you can swap the root volume of the instance with an EBS snapshot or an AMI. It helps to reset your instance to a previous known state in 10–15 minutes only. This significantly speeds up your CI and CD pipelines.

Amazon Polly launches two new Japanese NTTS voices. Neural Text To Speech (NTTS) produces the most natural and human-like text-to-speech voices possible. You can try these voices in the Polly section of the AWS Management Console. With this addition, according to my count, you can now choose among 52 NTTS voices in 28 languages or language variants (French from France or from Quebec, for example).

The AWS SDK for Java now includes the AWS CRT HTTP Client. The HTTP client is the center-piece powering our SDKs. Every single AWS API call triggers a network call to our API endpoints. It is therefore important to use a low-footprint and low-latency HTTP client library in our SDKs. AWS created a common HTTP client for all SDKs using the C programming language. We also offer 11 wrappers for 11 programming languages, from C++ to Swift. When you develop in Java, you now have the option to use this common HTTP client. It provides up to 76 percent cold start time reduction on AWS Lambda functions and up to 14 percent less memory usage compared to the Netty-based HTTP client provided by default. My colleague Zoe has more details in her blog post.

X in Y Jeff started this section a while ago to list the expansion of new services and capabilities to additional Regions. I noticed 10 Regional expansions this week:

Other AWS News
This week, I also noticed these AWS news items:

My colleague Mai-Lan shared some impressive customer stories and metrics related to the use and scale of Amazon S3 Glacier. Check it out to learn how to put your cold data to work.

Space is the final (edge) frontier. I read this blog post published on avionweek.com. It explains how AWS helps to deploy AIML models on observation satellites to analyze image quality before sending them to earth, saving up to 40 percent satellite bandwidth. Interestingly, the main cause for unusable satellite images is…clouds.

Upcoming AWS Events
Check your calendars and sign up for these AWS events:

AWS re:Invent recaps in your area. During the re:Invent week, we had lots of new announcements, and in the next weeks, you can find in your area a recap of all these launches. All the events are posted on this site, so check it regularly to find an event nearby.

AWS re:Invent keynotes, leadership sessions, and breakout sessions are available on demand. I recommend that you check the playlists and find the talks about your favorite topics in one collection.

AWS Summits season will restart in Q2 2023. The dates and locations will be announced here. Paris and Sidney are kicking off the season on April 4th. You can register today to attend these in-person, free events (Paris, Sidney).

Stay Informed
That was my selection for this week! To better keep up with all of this news, do not forget to check out the following resources:

— seb
This post is part of our Week in Review series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!

AWS Week In Review — September 26, 2022

Post Syndicated from Sébastien Stormacq original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-week-in-review-september-26-2022/

It looks like my travel schedule is coupled with this Week In Review series of blog posts. This week, I am traveling to Fort-de-France in the French Caribbean islands to meet our customers and partners. I enjoy the travel time when I am offline. It gives me the opportunity to reflect on the past or plan for the future.

Last Week’s Launches
Here are some of the launches that caught my eye last week:

Amazon SageMaker Autopilothas added a new Ensemble training mode powered by AutoGluon that is 8X faster than the current Hyper parameter Optimization Mode and supports a wide range of algorithms, including LightGBM, CatBoost, XGBoost, Random Forest, Extra Trees, linear models, and neural networks based on PyTorch and FastAI.

AWS Outposts and Amazon EKSYou can now deploy both the worker nodes and the Kubernetes control plane on an Outposts rack. This allows you to maximize your application availability in case of temporary network disconnection on premises. The Kubernetes control plane continues to manage the worker nodes, and no pod eviction happens when on-premises network connectivity is reestablished.

Amazon Corretto 19 – Corretto is a no-cost, multiplatform, production-ready distribution of OpenJDK. Corretto is distributed by Amazon under an open source license. This version supports the latest OpenJDK feature release and is available on Linux, Windows, and macOS. You can download Corretto 19 from our downloads page.

Amazon CloudWatch Evidently – Evidently is a fully-managed service that makes it easier to introduce experiments and launches in your application code. Evidently adds support for Client Side Evaluations (CSE) for AWS Lambda, powered by AWS AppConfig. Evidently CSE allows application developers to generate feature evaluations in single-digit milliseconds from within their own Lambda functions. Check the client-side evaluation documentation to learn more.

Amazon S3 on AWS OutpostsS3 on Outposts now supports object versioning. Versioning helps you to locally preserve, retrieve, and restore each version of every object stored in your buckets. Versioning objects makes it easier to recover from both unintended user actions and application failures.

Amazon PollyAmazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech. This week, we announced the general availability of Hiujin, Amazon Polly’s first Cantonese-speaking neural text-to-speech (NTTS) voice. With this launch, the Amazon Polly portfolio now includes 96 voices across 34 languages and language variants.

X in Y – We launched existing AWS services in additional Regions:

Other AWS News
Introducing the Smart City Competency program – The AWS Smart City Competency provides best-in-class partner recommendations to our customers and the broader market. With the AWS Smart City Competency, you can quickly and confidently identify AWS Partners to help you address Smart City focused challenges.

An update to IAM role trust policy behavior – This is potentially a breaking change. AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is changing an aspect of how role trust policy evaluation behaves when a role assumes itself. Previously, roles implicitly trusted themselves. AWS is changing role assumption behavior to always require self-referential role trust policy grants. This change improves consistency and visibility with regard to role behavior and privileges. This blog post shares the details and explains how to evaluate if your roles are impacted by this change and what to modify. According to our data, only 0.0001 percent of roles are impacted. We notified by email the account owners.

Amazon Music Unifies Music QueuingThe Amazon Music team published a blog post to explain how they created a unified music queue across devices. They used AWS AppSync and AWS Amplify to build a robust solution that scales to millions of music lovers.

Upcoming AWS Events
Check your calendar and sign up for an AWS event in your Region and language:

AWS re:Invent – Learn the latest from AWS and get energized by the community present in Las Vegas, Nevada. Registrations are open for re:Invent 2022 which will be held from Monday, November 28 to Friday, December 2.

AWS Summits – Come together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. Registration is open for the following in-person AWS Summits: Bogotá (October 4), and Singapore (October 6).

Natural Language Processing (NLP) Summit – The AWS NLP Summit 2022 will host over 25 sessions focusing on the latest trends, hottest research, and innovative applications leveraging NLP capabilities on AWS. It is happening at our UK headquarters in London, October 5–6, and you can register now.

AWS Innovate for every app – This regional online conference is designed to inspire and educate executives and IT professionals about AWS. It offers dozens of technical sessions in eight languages (English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Indonesian). Register today: Americas, September 28; Europe, Middle-East, and Africa, October 6; Asia Pacific & Japan, October 20.

AWS Innovate for every app

AWS Community DaysAWS Community Day events are community-led conferences to share and learn with one another. In September, the AWS community in the US will run events in Arlington, Virginia (September 30). In Europe, Community Day events will be held in October. Join us in Amersfoort, Netherlands (October 3), Warsaw, Poland (October 14), and Dresden, Germany (October 19).

AWS Tour du Cloud – The AWS Team in France has prepared a roadshow to meet customers and partners with a one-day free conference in seven cities across the country (Aix en Provence, Lille, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Strasbourg, Nantes, and Lyon), and in Fort-de-France, Martinique. Tour du Cloud France

AWS Fest – This third-party event will feature AWS influencers, community heroes, industry leaders, and AWS customers, all sharing AWS optimization secrets (this week on Wednesday, September). You can register for AWS Fest here.

Stay Informed
That is my selection for this week! To better keep up with all of this news, please check out the following resources:

— seb
This post is part of our Week in Review series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!

AWS Week in Review – May 2, 2022

Post Syndicated from Steve Roberts original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-week-in-review-may-2-2022/

This post is part of our Week in Review series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!

Wow, May already! Here in the Pacific Northwest, spring is in full bloom and nature has emerged completely from her winter slumbers. It feels that way here at AWS, too, with a burst of new releases and updates and our in-person summits and other events now in full flow. Two weeks ago, we had the San Francisco summit; last week, we held the London summit and also our .NET Enterprise Developer Day virtual event in EMEA. This week we have the Madrid summit, with more summits and events to come in the weeks ahead. Be sure to check the events section at the end of this post for a summary and registration links.

Last week’s launches
Here are some of the launches and updates last week that caught my eye:

If you’re looking to reduce or eliminate the operational overhead of managing your Apache Kafka clusters, then the general availability of Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) Serverless will be of interest. Starting with the original release of Amazon MSK in 2019, the work needed to set up, scale, and manage Apache Kafka has been reduced, requiring just minutes to create a cluster. With Amazon MSK Serverless, the provisioning, scaling, and management of the required resources is automated, eliminating the undifferentiated heavy-lift. As my colleague Marcia notes in her blog post, Amazon MSK Serverless is a perfect solution when getting started with a new Apache Kafka workload where you don’t know how much capacity you will need or your applications produce unpredictable or highly variable throughput and you don’t want to pay for idle capacity.

Another week, another set of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances! This time around, it’s new storage-optimized I4i instances based on the latest generation Intel Xeon Scalable (Ice Lake) Processors. These new instances are ideal for workloads that need minimal latency, and fast access to data held on local storage. Examples of these workloads include transactional databases such as MySQL, Oracle DB, and Microsoft SQL Server, as well as NoSQL databases including MongoDB, Couchbase, Aerospike, and Redis. Additionally, workloads that benefit from very high compute performance per TB of storage (for example, data analytics and search engines) are also an ideal target for these instance types, which offer up to 30 TB of AWS Nitro SSD storage.

Deploying AWS compute and storage services within telecommunications providers’ data centers, at the edge of the 5G networks, opens up interesting new possibilities for applications requiring end-to-end low latency (for example, delivery of high-resolution and high-fidelity live video streaming, and improved augmented/virtual reality (AR/VR) experiences). The first AWS Wavelength deployments started in the US in 2020, and have expanded to additional countries since. This week we announced the opening of the first Canadian AWS Wavelength zone, in Toronto.

Other AWS News
Some other launches and news items you may have missed:

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) had a busy week. I don’t have room to list them all, so below is just a subset of updates!

  • The addition of IPv6 support enables customers to simplify their networking stack. The increase in address space offered by IPv6 removes the need to manage overlapping address spaces in your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)s. IPv6 addressing can be enabled on both new and existing RDS instances.
  • Customers in the Asia Pacific (Sydney) and Asia Pacific (Singapore) Regions now have the option to use Multi-AZ deployments to provide enhanced availability and durability for Amazon RDS DB instances, offering one primary and two readable standby database instances spanning three Availability Zones (AZs). These deployments benefit from up to 2x faster transaction commit latency, and automated fail overs, typically under 35 seconds.
  • Amazon RDS PostgreSQL users can now choose from General-Purpose M6i and Memory-Optimized R6i instance types. Both of these sixth-generation instance types are AWS Nitro System-based, delivering practically all of the compute and memory resources of the host hardware to your instances.
  • Applications using RDS Data API can now elect to receive SQL results as a simplified JSON string, making it easier to deserialize results to an object. Previously, the API returned a JSON string as an array of data type and value pairs, which required developers to write custom code to parse the response and extract the values, so as to translate the JSON string into an object. Applications that use the API to receive the previous JSON format are still supported and will continue to work unchanged.

Applications using Amazon Interactive Video Service (IVS), offering low-latency interactive video experiences, can now add a livestream chat feature, complete with built-in moderation, to help foster community participation in livestreams using Q&A discussions. The new chat support provides chat room resource management and a messaging API for sending, receiving, and moderating chat messages.

Amazon Polly now offers a new Neural Text-to-Speech (TTS) voice, Vitória, for Brazilian Portuguese. The original Vitória voice, dating back to 2016, used standard technology. The new voice offers a more natural-sounding rhythm, intonation, and sound articulation. In addition to Vitória, Polly also offers a second Brazilian Portuguese neural voice, Camila.

Finally, if you’re a .NET developer who’s modernizing .NET Framework applications to run in the cloud, then the announcement that the open-source CoreWCF project has reached its 1.0 release milestone may be of interest. AWS is a major contributor to the project, a port of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), to run on modern cross-platform .NET versions (.NET Core 3.1, or .NET 5 or higher). This project benefits all .NET developers working on WCF applications, not just those on AWS. You can read more about the project in my blog post from last year, where I spoke with one of the contributing AWS developers. Congratulations to all concerned on reaching the 1.0 milestone!

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New at AWS page.

Upcoming AWS Events
As I mentioned earlier, the AWS Summits are in full flow, with some some virtual and in-person events in the very near future you may want to check out:

I’m also happy to share that I’ll be joining the AWS on Air crew at AWS Summit Washington, DC. This in-person event is coming up May 23–25. Be sure to tune in to the livestream for all the latest news from the event, and if you’re there in person feel free to come say hi!

Registration is also now open for re:MARS, our conference for topics related to machine learning, automation, robotics, and space. The conference will be in-person in Las Vegas, June 21–24.

That’s all the news I have room for this week — check back next Monday for another week in review!

— Steve