Amazing Fables Brings Stories to Life with Amazon Polly

One of the benefits of being on AWS, Leow says, is the ability to explore new technologies through off-the-shelf tools such as Amazon Polly. Amazing Fables uses Amazon Polly to bring its stories to life, by “reading” its books to customers. “There were other text-to-speech technologies out there, but in my opinion, they weren’t good enough. I was pleasantly surprised when I came across Amazon Polly while doing research on how to create interactive books,” Leow says. Customer feedback has been positive, with buyers noting how accurate pronunciation is.

There is a certain amount of manual manipulation required, such as matching the timing of Amazon Polly’s output to a particular book, Leow explains, but AWS online documentation is thorough. “Overall, the learning curve was not steep. It was more getting used to the syntax and how to use the Speech Synthesis Markup Language feature to have different intonations and accents,” he says. Amazing Fables’ stories have been translated into popular languages such as Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, French, German, Korean, Indonesian, and a few other languages.

Video books are offered as a free supplement to the printed version, and they provide valuable word-of-mouth marketing when parents and kids share the videos with friends. “The applications of Amazon Polly are limitless,” Leow says, explaining his use of Amazon Polly in other projects that use artificial intelligence to support multilingual video editing. He also envisions use cases for animating chatbots to help visually impaired people or automate public announcements.

Learn more about text to speech.

Amazing Fables is able to run with a lean team of three, together with 11 freelancers from around the world, because most processes are automated. With AWS Auto Scaling, it only takes one engineer to maintain its website and applications. In its first six months, the startup sold more than 1,000 books, and international sales are continuing to rise. Leow says, “With AWS, we can easily optimize the loading speed of our website across different geographies, so customers in Australia and Chile have the same low latency.”

For now, Amazing Fables is focused on content development and marketing. “AWS has future-proofed our business for growth, and this gives me reassurance,” concludes Leow. “I’m excited to see what new services and solutions AWS will deliver next, along the lines of Amazon Polly, which can further enhance our storytelling experience.”