US Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese neural voices join Amazon Polly

Amazon Polly turns text into lifelike speech. In July 2019, AWS launched eight US English and three UK English voices in Neural Text-to-Speech (NTTS) technology, which delivers ground-breaking improvements in speech quality through a new machine learning approach. Polly is now adding the first non-English NTTS voices, in US Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. Introducing Lupe and Camila!

Why US Spanish?

There are an estimated 59.8 million Hispanic people in the United States. (This figure comes from the US Census annual estimate as of July 1, 2018.) Companies that provide engaging online content to their Hispanic audience set themselves up for success. The new US Spanish voice, Lupe, joins this trend. After Miguel and Penelope, it is the third US Spanish TTS voice in the Amazon Polly portfolio. Lupe offers a human-like quality with enhanced intonation, especially when listening to the neural version of the voice. Lupe not only speaks Spanish but also handles English very well; it provides a fully bilingual Spanish-English experience. All this thanks to an extended phoneme coverage, comprised of 72 English and Spanish phoneme variants. In contrast, the phone set for Penélope and Miguel contains only 29 Spanish phonemes.

Listen now Voiced by Amazon Polly

Listen now Voiced by Amazon Polly

Why Brazilian Portuguese?

We developed Camila, the new Brazilian Portuguese TTS voice, to support customers whose priority is to provide best-in-class TTS voices for their Brazilian Portuguese speaking audience. Similar to Lupe, Camila is a natural-sounding TTS voice which demonstrates a high prosodic quality. Thanks to an extended phoneme coverage the voice is well equipped to handle the contemporary Brazilian Portuguese language with all its English loan words. The synthesis generated by this voice is smooth and clear, which makes Camila a pleasant voice to listen to. Amazon Polly customers can from now on enjoy a selection of three Brazilian Portuguese voices: Ricardo, Vitória and Camila.

Listen now Voiced by Amazon Polly

Listen now Voiced by Amazon Polly

The neural versions of Camila and Lupe are the first two non-English NTTS voices that Amazon Polly offers, and are available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland) Regions. Standard versions of these voices are also available across 18 AWS Regions.

Amazon Polly now offers a selection of 61 voices across 29 languages. Of these, thirteen voices in four languages are available in both standard and neural technology.

Try these new voices and experience for yourself the natural-sounding NTTS technology powering Camila and Lupe.

About the Author

Marta Smolarek is a Program Manager in the Amazon Text-to-Speech team. At work she connects the dots. In her spare time, she loves to go camping with her family.