Amazon Polly transforms text into natural-sounding speech, supporting multilingual capabilities with features like neural voices and speed adjustments.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| Amazon Polly | 13.9% |
| Microsoft Azure Speech Service | 16.0% |
| Google Cloud Text-to-Speech | 13.7% |
| Other | 56.400000000000006% |
| Type | Title | Date | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Category | Text-To-Speech Services | Jun 23, 2026 | Download |
| Product | Reviews, tips, and advice from real users | Jun 23, 2026 | Download |
| Comparison | Amazon Polly vs Deepgram | Jun 23, 2026 | Download |
| Comparison | Amazon Polly vs Google Cloud Text-to-Speech | Jun 23, 2026 | Download |
| Comparison | Amazon Polly vs Microsoft Azure Speech Service | Jun 23, 2026 | Download |
| Title | Rating | Mindshare | Recommending | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Azure Speech Service | 4.5 | 16.0% | 100% | 3 interviewsAdd to research |
| Deepgram | 4.2 | 9.1% | 81% | 11 interviewsAdd to research |
Amazon Polly offers a suite of innovative text-to-speech features designed to emulate human interaction across multiple languages including Spanish, Portuguese, and German. Integration with AWS services and Amazon chat ensures seamless text-to-speech experiences. SSML facilitates precise speech modulation, while the customization options allow users to adjust voice settings, such as pitch and speed, to meet specific communication needs. Despite its many advantages, users note the high cost, desire improved lexicon support, and seek enhancements in interface usability and accessibility.
What are the standout features of Amazon Polly?Amazon Polly is employed across different industries to facilitate inclusive communication. It is widely used in contact centers via Amazon Connect, aids in delivering accessible audio messages to individuals with disabilities, and enhances user experience in meditation apps and IVR systems through precise SSML tag checks and audio integration.
| Author info | Rating | Review Summary |
|---|---|---|
| Senior Software Developer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees | 4.0 | I use Amazon Polly to convert text into speech, primarily for disabled users and IVR calls. Its multilingual capabilities and integration with AWS are valuable, but I wish it offered more natural speech and additional languages to enhance its utility. |
| Works | 3.5 | I find Amazon Polly's natural sound and SSML voice customization excellent for my meditation app. However, the initial AWS setup is overly complex and not user-friendly, making it a significant hurdle despite good scalability. |
| Sr. Manager - Advanced Solutions Delivery | 4.0 | I extensively use Amazon Polly for Amazon Connect, valuing its diverse voices and global language options for customer experience. While stable and scalable with good support, I wish for voice mimicking and better hard phone integration. I rate it 8/10. |
| Lead Engineer at HCLTech | 3.5 | I use Amazon Polly with AWS for text-to-speech in Amazon Connect, leveraging SSML tags for enhanced speech patterns. However, using multiple tags for conversational speech sometimes results in errors, which needs improvement. |
| Owner at a non-profit with 1-10 employees | 3.5 | I use Amazon Polly for text-to-speech, valuing its realistic neural voices and selective reading for legal documents. My main concerns are its high price and the need for specialized lexicon packages, plus broader use case promotion beyond commercial. |
Neutral
Positive
We use Amazon Polly to check the SSML tags to see how they play the prompt.
We can play text-to-speech when we need to play some prompts inside Amazon Connect. Any number we provide will be played as digits when we play text-to-speech. By using SSML tags in a conversational manner in Amazon Polly, we can convert those digits into numbers. We can use the SSML tags in Amazon Polly to modify text-to-speech by controlling speech patterns and behaviour.
When you put more tags inside Amazon Polly to define break time and instruct the speech to be conversational, sometimes it gives you an error.
I have been using Amazon Polly for two and a half years.
Based on the internet bandwidth, we have faced glitches when Amazon Polly converts text to speech.
Around seven people in my team use the solution.
The solution’s initial setup is easy.
The solution has a pay-as-you-go pricing model, where you must pay according to your usage.
I would recommend the solution to other users. This application converts all text to speech by adding behaviour and emotion, similar to how a normal person speaks. It helps contact centers interact with their customers as if they are speaking with them and not reading something. It is easy for a beginner to learn to use Amazon Polly for the first time.
Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.
I use Amazon Polly to turn text into spoken audio.
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.
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.
I haven't used Amazon Polly for too long.
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.
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.
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.
On a scale from one to ten, I would give Amazon Polly a seven.