Amazon launches a WordPress plugin that turns blog posts into audio, including podcasts

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From Tech Crunch:

Amazon today is launching a new Amazon Polly WordPress plugin that gives your blog a voice by creating audio versions of your posts. The resulting audio can be played from within the blog post itself, or accessed in podcast form using a feature called Amazon Pollycast, the company says.

The plugin itself was jointly designed by Amazon’s AWS team and managed WordPress platform provider WP Engine, and takes advantage of Amazon’s text-to-speech service, Polly.

First introduced at Amazon’s re:Invent developer event back in November 2016, Polly uses machine learning technologies under the hood to deliver more life-like speech. For example, Polly understands that the word “live” would be pronounced differently based on its usage. In the phrases “I live in Seattle” and “Live from New York,” the word is spelled the same but is not spoken in the same way. That means the voices sound more natural than some other, more basic voice-to-text engines.

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The technology’s capabilities have also evolved, with added support for things like whispering, speech marks, a timbre effect, and dynamic range compression. These sorts of voice technology advancements are also things that make Alexa sound more natural, too.

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In addition to simply reading posts aloud, Polly’s flexibility means you could configure different voices for different bylines, or use different voices for quoted text – if you’re technically-minded – these options aren’t available in the plugin itself. Polly could also offer translation capabilities so your blog could be read by those who speak other languages.

Link to the rest at Tech Crunch

4 thoughts on “Amazon launches a WordPress plugin that turns blog posts into audio, including podcasts”

      • Although voice transcription software has improved enormously over the years, it still produces text rife with errors that require a human editor to do a pass on. I’m sure Joanna’s wonderful interview transcriptions need to have this done, as well.

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