Amazon Polly Reviews

What is our primary use case?

I use Amazon Polly to turn text into spoken audio.

What is most valuable?

Amazon Polly is useful because it's helpful to hear the words on top of it when I can't take in information in a general way. Sometimes, it's very taxing if I'm trying to read cases. They have the neural voices, and they're so realistic. You don't even know that a person is not reading to you, making things much better. I know that they do have the ability to provide you with your own lexicon that's personal to you. I like that you can adjust the pitch and the speed of the voice because some people talk way too fast. Or if you're reading, I read slowly, so that's always helpful.One of the functions that I find helpful is that it feels like it has its own browser when reading material on the web. You go to the URL, and you don't have to read the whole thing, and you can stick the cursor on the place where you want it to start. Then if you want it to skip over something, you put it somewhere else, and that's ideal for reading case law because you skip around a lot. You don't really read it from start to finish. It helps if someone's going to read all those citations because they definitely want to be able to skip that.

What needs improvement?

The price could be better. I wish it weren't so expensive to do because it's really cool. I would love to see them have lexicon packages of them like, this is for lawyers, this is for accountants, and it's going to have a lot of things in it. I also think they could do a better job at showing use cases other than telemarketing or contact center stuff like bots that are very commercial. I know that's where the money is, but it's such a huge hole that's missing for people with disabilities that are even worse than mine. Some people cannot see or hear at all, but they're not just cognitively impaired. 

For how long have I used the solution?

I haven't used Amazon Polly for too long.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It's stable, but I think it's because I've only been using it just as it's on the AWS. I don't know how to make an app or know exactly what I'd want the app to be like, etc. I'm just testing it to see if I can deal with these voices and deal with the price.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The price could be better. Neural voices are so realistic, and I want to say that they have it so that you can try to tell where the voice is coming from or something like that. But if I have more than one, it's so expensive to have to listen to a bunch of cases on my phone and have the neural voice read to me. It really wouldn't be worth it. It'd be paying probably more than what I make in the case. Right now, I'm on the free tier, and I think the number of minutes that you get is reasonable as long as you're not doing this all the time and you're using it judiciously. I have some credits that I think I can use, but I don't know how fast they'll go through.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

The standard price is better for Amazon Transcribe than it's for Amazon Polly. It's not worth it if I keep getting everything wrong, and it's aggravating. So far, if it works great, I found that the standard and the enhanced option are usually good enough. I think Transcribe would be good to keep me where everyone else is in a meeting, so I'm not falling behind and not knowing what's going on. Even if I do, I have the transcript at the end that I can go over and be like, “Oh yeah, that's what they were doing.” The good thing about transcription is that you can keep it and read it afterward.

What other advice do I have?

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Amazon Polly a seven.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Amazon Web Services (AWS)