Amazon Polly delivers a major upgrade to its Generative engine

Amazon Polly Generative engine now offers more natural and accurate speech output. We’re introducing an upgrade to the Amazon Polly Generative engine that delivers more expressive, more accurate speech output with low latency. The upgrade adds 14 new voices across 9 locales, including general availability of Generative voices in Hindi and Finnish for the first time. The upgrade is now generally available in production.

Importantly, this is a drop-in upgrade for existing generative voices. Voice names and API calls are unchanged, so your existing applications continue to work as they do today.

Amazon Polly is a fully managed AWS service that converts text into natural-sounding speech for contact centers, large language model (LLM)-based agentic applications, media and entertainment, e-learning, accessibility, and other applications that require reliable voice output at scale.

Hear the difference

You can use sample audio to evaluate the improvements directly.

• The more natural, authentic, and expressive voices. Hear how Tiffany welcomes you in a delightful tone.
  • “Hi there! I’m Tiffany, one of Polly’s generative voices. I was built to sound natural, expressive, and a little bit delightful. What should we talk about?”
    
• Accurate speech generation for numbers, currency, addresses, and so on. Kenneth reads back an order confirmation, including the tracking number, date and time, currency and address accurately.
  • “Thanks for calling. Your order, number 4471 9902 ships today to 85 Harbor View Drive, Apartment 4B, Portland, Oregon 97209. It should arrive on Thursday, October 22nd, between 9 AM and 1 PM. Your total was $1,284.50 and your confirmation code is K-7-Q-2-X-9.”
    
• Net new languages. Arjun and Kiara for Hindi, and Suvi for Finnish. Hindi and Finnish are generally available for the first time on the Amazon Polly Generative engine.
  • Arjun: नमस्कार, आप सुन रहे हैं आज की मुख्य ख़बरें। देश के कई हिस्सों में मानसून की विदाई के साथ मौसम सुहाना हो गया है। (Hello, you’re listening to today’s top stories. As the monsoon retreats across much of the country, the weather has turned pleasant.)
    
  • Kiara: नमस्ते! मेरा नाम कियारा है। आइए, आज मैं आपको एक छोटी सी कहानी सुनाती हूँ।(Hello! My name is Kiara. Come, let me tell you a little story today.)
    
  • Suvi: Majakanvartija ei ollut nähnyt laivaa yhteentoista päivään. Sitten, vähän puolenyön jälkeen, horisontissa välähti yksi ainoa valo. Kerran. Kahdesti. Ja sitten, uskomatonta kyllä, se vilkutti takaisin hänen nimensä. (The lighthouse keeper hadn’t seen a ship in eleven days. Then, just after midnight, a single light blinked on the horizon. Once. Twice. And then, impossibly, it blinked back his name.)
    
• Different styles of speech delivery based on textual context. Powered by the new Amazon Polly Generative engine, the voices can reflect emotion and prosody even better based on the text input, without manual setup.
  • Neutral: “Your package arrived early.”
    
  • Uncertainty: “So, um… your package arrived early. I think?”
    
  • Surprised: “Wait, what? Your package arrived early?”
    

New voices, languages, and Region availability

• A larger catalog overall for Amazon Polly Generative engine – Totaling 57 generative voices across 11 languages and 25 locales.
• 14 new voices across 9 locales – US English (Kenneth, Nate), Australian English (Russell, Curtis), Indian English (Kiara, Arjun), German (Tina), US Spanish (Carlos), Brazilian Portuguese (Leo, Carolina), Korean (Hyunduk), Hindi (Kiara, Arjun) and Finnish (Suvi).
• Net new languages generally available in Generative engine – Hindi and Finnish.
• Region expansion to AWS GovCloud (US-West) – Totaling 11 AWS Regions.

Built for production-ready speech workflows for enterprise

The upgraded Amazon Polly Generative engine uses a standard Amazon Polly API call to build your speech applications. With Amazon Polly, you can continue to build with familiar AWS patterns: call the same Amazon Polly API, manage access with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), use the output in your existing applications and contact-center flows, and monitor the workloads that synthesize speech for your customers.

This launch is designed to elevate the speech output quality that you can hear with your existing Amazon Polly implementation. No changes to your code are required to get the upgraded voices. For applications that already use Amazon Polly Generative voices, the upgrade happens in place. For new applications, the same SynthesizeSpeech API gives you access to a larger set of generative voice catalogs. With the Bi-Di Streaming API StartSpeechSynthesisStream, you can stream text to Amazon Polly and receive synthesized audio back simultaneously. This is well-suited for real-time applications like voice agents and bespoke characters in games.

Competitive price-performance

The Amazon Polly Generative engine offers competitive pricing on a pay-as-you-go basis. With this model upgrade, you get improved voice quality and accuracy at the same price. There’s no cost increase, no new SKU, and no changes to your existing integration. You can cache and replay synthesized static prompts with no additional cost. Refer to Amazon Polly pricing for complete cost information.

The Amazon Polly Generative engine now delivers more natural, expressive speech alongside low-latency streaming for real-time applications, Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) support for fine-grained control, and the operational reliability of a fully managed AWS service. This combination of quality, performance, and cost efficiency supports a wide range of production use cases.

What you can build

Contact centers. Accuracy matters most in customer service conversations. When a caller checks an order, a voice that reads back the tracking number, address, and confirmation code correctly helps resolve the call in self-service rather than escalating to a human agent. Amazon Polly Generative voice’s accurate entity pronunciation and low-latency generation make automated interactive voice response (IVR) interactions sound more conversational.

Cascaded voice agents. Using Amazon Polly in a voice agent framework, you can convert LLM response text into clear, natural-sounding speech and stream it back to users in near real time over WebSockets or telephony channels. This makes live conversational voice possible. The primary benefits are low-latency playback, high scalability, and cost efficiency.

Media, localization, and dubbing. Convert scripts into finished audio for video, advertising, podcasts, product overviews, and audiobooks. You can use one voice or many, without a studio session. More natural intonation reduces post-production. The expanded locale coverage, including first-time generative Hindi and Finnish, means you can localize a single piece of content into more markets from the same pipeline.

E-learning and training. Narrate courseware, onboarding, and knowledge-based articles at scale, and update them as soon as the source text changes. No re-recording is required. More expressive delivery supports engagement through long-form material.

Accessibility. Provide a clear, natural spoken version of articles, documents, and applications so more people can consume your content by listening: read aloud, on the go, or with a screen reader.

Interactive and transactional experiences. Voice-enable games, kiosks, IVR menus, and IoT devices with responses generated on demand. Use Amazon Polly when the voice needs to sound natural and read names, numbers, product details, addresses, and confirmations reliably.

“At Sanoma Media Finland, we use Amazon Polly to turn our real-time news articles into audio, giving the listener the choice to listen whenever it suits them better. Today we publish over 10,000 articles per month using Polly’s Finnish neural voice. Based on our testing, Suvi’s new generative voice is a clear improvement over the previous neural voice – it sounds noticeably more natural and makes for a more enjoyable experience for the listener.”

— Justus Reinikainen, Product Manager, Sanoma Media Finland

Getting started

You can access the new voices using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), or the AWS SDKs.

Prerequisites:

• Active AWS account with Amazon Polly access.
• AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) installed and configured.
• Python 3.10+.
• Boto3 installed: pip install boto3.
• AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) permissions: polly:SynthesizeSpeech.

Here’s a quick example using the AWS SDK for Python (Boto3) with the SynthesizeSpeech API and a generative voice:

import boto3

polly = boto3.client("polly", region_name="us-east-1")

response = polly.synthesize_speech(
    Text="Hello! This is Amazon Polly's next-generation generative voice.",
    VoiceId="Kenneth",  # any generative voice in the catalogue
    Engine="generative",
    OutputFormat="mp3",
)

with open("speech.mp3", "wb") as f:
    f.write(response["AudioStream"].read())

You can also make the same request with the AWS CLI:

aws polly synthesize-speech 
  --region us-east-1 
  --voice-id Kenneth 
  --engine generative 
  --output-format mp3 
  --text "Hello! This is Amazon Polly's next-generation generative voice." 
  speech.mp3

To retrieve the full, current voice list programmatically, call DescribeVoices. You can use this in deployment checks to confirm that a selected generative voice is available in the Region where your application runs.

Availability

The next-generation Generative engine and the new voices are now generally available. The 14 new Generative voices are available in the following AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Zurich), Europe (London), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), and AWS GovCloud (US-West). Getting started, by audience:

• Developers – Call synthesize_speech with Engine="generative" in your existing application. No other changes are required.
• Contact-center teams – The improvements reach Amazon Connect and Genesys flows automatically.
• Everyone – Access any voice in the Amazon Polly console.

A few things to know:

• Standard and neural voices are unaffected.
• Speech marks are not available on generative voices (unchanged from today). If your application requires them, standard and neural voices continue to support them.
• Generative engine continues to support SSML tags. See supported SSML tags for more details.
• Use current voice availability at runtime. Call DescribeVoices or check the console when deploying across Regions.

Conclusion

The next-generation Generative engine of Amazon Polly is available today, delivering more natural and more accurate voices, adding 14 new voices, including generative voices generally available in Hindi and Finnish for the first time, and requires no change to your code. See Amazon Polly pricing page for pricing information. To get started, open the Amazon Polly console to try the voices, and see the Amazon Polly documentation to build with them.

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