Credit: AWS
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the general availability of Aria, the first New Zealand English voice in its Amazon Polly neural text-to-speech service offering.
Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech, letting partners and their customers build new categories of speech-enabled products and create applications that talk.
Polly's text-to-speech (TTS) service uses advanced deep learning technologies to synthesise natural sounding human speech, providing a voice that is expressive, natural and easy to follow, according to the cloud giant.
Already, the service claims dozens of lifelike voices across a broad set of languages, with speech-enabled applications able to work in many different countries.
Common Amazon Polly use cases include newsreaders,
audiobooks, e-learning content, virtual assistants and interactive voice response (IVR) systems.
Bank of New Zealand (BNZ) is just one of the many local customers that have made use of the Polly offering, with the bank last year revealing the planned introduction of a unique Amazon Polly brand voice, Āwhina, to its customers this year.
In April last year, AWS' Chatbot product entered general availability for all commercial AWS regions.
Chatbot is an interactive agent for chat operations, or ChatOps, that can monitor and interact with AWS resources in Slack channels and Amazon Chime.
It can send alerts, run commands to return diagnostic information, invoke AWS Lambda functions and create AWS support cases.
More recently, in July this year, AWS launched a new programme designed to help partners better equip customers with cloud expertise.
The cloud giant’s AWS Training Partner programme is expected to enable AWS customers to work with a single partner who can deliver and resell official AWS-authored training.
