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AWS brings tailored personas to Amazon Polly with custom brand voices.
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NAB is one of the first global customers to adopt Brand Voice, which is currently being rolled out.
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The new custom voice service competes with companies that offer customized digital voices that resemble the human voice.
Recently, Amazon has announced that it will collaborate with brands to aid them to make custom text-to-speech voices for their Alexa skills. Imagine, for instance, that you’re ordering KFC using KFC’s Alexa system, but instead of the default Alexa voice responding to you, it’s Colonel Sanders himself. That’s what Amazon’s going for right here, and also it’s something that Amazon and KFC together actually developed.
Not just KFC but it will enable companies to use neural text-to-speech technology to tailor voice to suit any brand's persona.
"In the crowded digital space where voice is becoming very important as part of a customer's brand experience, we're now allowing customers to create a very unique, local identity to represent some of the products and services."
-Peter Stansky, AWS head of solution architecture for Australia and New Zealand
The voices for various brands are offered through Amazon Polly, an Alexa service that previously supplied neural network-based text-to-speech services for companies to use to add realistic voices to their Alexa skills. Now, though, Amazon is offering its neutral network-based TTS (Text-to-Speech) technology to create custom voices for a specific brand based on recordings of voices of an actor or actress picked by the brand in partnership with Amazon.
This technology is identical to what Amazon used to make the that it introduced in September 2019. Jackson didn’t record every single phrase that he can say as Alexa — instead, he recorded audio of his voice that Amazon’s neural text-to-speech models can translate into natural-sounding responses.
Now it seems as if any brand that wants to work with Amazon can build an Alexa skill with a custom voice. Colonel Sanders' voice in the KFC skill is pretty impressive if you were wondering — you can . Hopefully, somebody makes a Kool-Aid Man-voiced Alexa skill next.
As part of the launch, AWS has announced National Australia Bank (NAB) as one of the first customers globally to adopt the new feature. NAB has used Brand Voice to create a "hand-crafted persona", which will be rolled out soon across its call centers nationally.
"NAB gets about 9 million calls annually. So what they were looking for was to have a much more robust and scalable call center solution that can help customers get access to information and help across the entire NAB brand and Amazon Polly service is here.
According to NAB digital and assisted channels general manager Laurent De Segur, the use of Brand Voice follows the bank's contact center adoption of Amazon Connect.
"We are looking to Amazon Connect to help us improve the experience customers have when they contact our call centers. For that reason, it was also important that the voice we created using Amazon Polly Brand Voice felt both uniquely NAB and consistent with our position and what our customers expect when they call us."
-Laurent De Segur, General Manager at NAB
Amazon detailed its work on AI-generated speech in a research paper late last year named in which researchers described a system that can style from just a few hours of training as opposed to the tens of hours it might take a voice actor to read in a target style.
Amazon's AI model consists of two components. The first is a generative neural network that converts a sequence of phonemes into a sequence of spectrograms or visual representations of the spectrum of frequencies of sound as they vary with time. The second is a vocoder that converts those spectrograms into a continuous audio signal.
With Brand Voice and its other neural text-to-speech services, Amazon is effectively going toe to toe with Google, which recently debuted and 24 new standard voices in its Cloud Text-to-Speech service (bringing a total number of WaveNet voices are 57). There are some . It has another rival in Microsoft, which offers three AI-generated voices in preview and 75 standard voices via its Azure Speech Service API.
Amazon��s Brand Voice also competes with offerings from startups like Voicery, which delivers customized digital voices that sound impressively human-like. Text-to-speech tech startup iSpeech boasts comparable voice cloning tools, as does Modulate, Respeecher, Resemble AI, Descript, and Bengaluru, India-based DeepSync. Apart from these, there are some new tech companies like Sony that are bringing.
Alexa’s News Reading like Newscaster
Alexa can read out news in a much more natural, humanlike way by selectively emphasizing some words in a sentence in the same way a real newscaster would. It provides short abstracts of the top news from over 50 news sources. You can get a list of possible news sources and then request to listen to the latest news from a new source in the list. Alexa also adopts a different style when reading out information from a Wikipedia page.
Amazon Polly Service
Amazon Polly is a cloud service that converts text into lifelike speech and allows to create applications that talk and build entirely new categories of speech-enabled products. Amazon Polly is a Text-to-Speech service that uses advanced deep learning technologies to synthesize speech that sounds like a human voice.
With dozens of lifelike voices across a variety of languages, you can select the ideal voice and build speech-enabled applications that work in many different countries. Along with its benefits, the . It was launched in November 2016 and now includes 60 voices across 29 languages