BlueToad, a content delivery platform, has been chosen by Amazon to be a launch partner for its new voice technology offered through the company’s Amazon Polly service – one in the style of a traditional newscaster.
This new voice is enabled by Amazon Polly Neural Text-to-Speech (NTTS) technology. NTTS is an enhanced, more realistic voice experience that learns to speak by listening to recorded human speech and copying it, similar to how a human child learns to speak. As a result, it can understand the differences in speaking styles and generate speech in an expressive and lifelike way.
BlueToad had the opportunity to be an early tester of the service and to ultimately offer Polly’s NTTS Newscaster voice to publishers. BlueToad is constantly evolving its publishing platform to stay ahead of content consumption trends, and with Polly’s NTTS Newscaster voice, BlueToad’s text-to-speech article feature is poised to offer publishers a simple but powerful way to freshly engage their audience through realistic listening experiences.
BlueToad has consistently taken advantage of the diverse set of Amazon Polly voices by using voices with languages and accents native to the publication’s readers. Additionally, BlueToad attempts to determine the likely gender of the author of each article—based on census data matching first names to declared gender—then matching to an appropriate Polly voice in the right language and accent.
In 2017, BlueToad introduced the ability for publishers to offer audio versions of the articles found in their digital magazines. With the growth of audio as a platform to consume content, the company began utilizing Amazon Polly as an easy audio solution for publishers. Now updated with Polly’s NTTS Newscaster voice, publishers have even more ways to connect readers with their content.