Amazon Polly Expands to the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Region and Adds Two New Voices

Amazon Polly is an AWS service that turns text into lifelike speech. Today, we are excited to announce the expansion to the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Region, as well as the release of two new Text-to-Speech voices. We are pleased to present Takumi, a new Japanese male voice, and Matthew, a new US English male voice.

When we launched Amazon Polly in November 2016, we offered a portfolio of 47 voices spread across 24 languages. Since the day we launched, customers have been requesting additional languages and voices, as well as expansions to new AWS Regions. We’ve been listening.

Amazon Polly has been accessible worldwide from the following AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland). Today we add a fifth AWS Region: Asia Pacific (Tokyo). This new option will provide increased stability and reduced latency for those customers in the Asia Pacific Region, and we look forward to continuing our regional expansion to further optimize the Amazon Polly Text-to-Speech service for all customers.

To accompany our regional expansion in Japan, we are adding the voice of Takumi to our Japanese language portfolio. Our voice offerings already include the female voice Mizuki, so we now offer gender parity in Japanese. This will especially benefit those customers whose use cases are enhanced by increased diversity in voice profile.

Since our launch of Amazon Polly with 7 US English voices, including 5 female and 2 male voices, customers have been requesting an additional male voice to complement Joey and Justin (a boy voice). We heard you, and we prioritized building the voice we call Matthew. We hope that this new addition will become a popular selection among the US English voices.

Without further ado, please allow Takumi and Matthew to introduce themselves:

Takumi

Matthew

With the addition of Takumi and Matthew, following the release of the German female voice Vicki earlier this year, the Amazon Polly portfolio now includes 50 voices, available across 5 AWS Regions. Try them all out on our Amazon Polly Console. Or, you can start your own voiced application with the help of our Amazon Polly documentation. We also encourage you to share your feedback with us! Your input helps shape our roadmap, so that we can better meet your needs. If you have questions or suggestions, please comment below.