Spanish Newscaster speaking style now available in Amazon Polly

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Amazon Polly is launching its first non-English Newscaster speaking style voice, Lupe. This female US Spanish voice is the third Newscaster speaking style voice in Amazon Polly, following the launches of US English voices Matthew and Joanna. All Newscaster voices are made possible by the Neural Text-to-Speech (NTTS) technology of Amazon Polly.

News content is shaped by its own unique characteristics. Sentences and paragraphs are usually short and highly informative because writers have to compress information into a limited space. Depending on the theme, news articles may contain relevant terminology, place names, abbreviations, people’s names, and quotes. Excellent news writing is clear, precise, and avoids ambiguity. The writing is dynamic, especially in online articles, because content may get updated multiple times per day as new information becomes available.

New technologies play an important role in evolving the channels by which you consume news content. Readers want the news to be convenient to access, so voicing news content is becoming more and more popular. To address this growing demand, the Amazon Polly team is launching a Newscaster speaking style voice based on the recently released female US Spanish voice, Lupe. For more information about the recent additions to Amazon Polly, see US Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese neural voices join Amazon Polly.

Lupe is now available in both neural and standard technology. Listen to the following audio samples by Lupe, first in the neutral neural style (speaking-style free), and second in the Newscaster speaking style:

Neutral Lupe

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Newscaster Lupe

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The Newscaster version of Lupe is tailored to suit the needs of news publishers, and represents all types of domains. The voice is more human-like, natural, and crisp. Lupe’s Newscaster voice is designed to attract the US Spanish audience by handling both pure Spanish text and Spanish content with English words or short phrases. Thanks to the improved intonation and emphasis of the Newscaster style, the audio version of written articles grabs your attention and contributes to an increase in overall engagement.

“With respect to news reports content, it is important that the voice is swift and places the right emphasis on pauses,” says Oren Liberman, COO of Trinity Audio. “In our tests, we got a lot of feedback that listeners found the pauses in the Newscaster style to be more accurate and fluent. We are seeing more and more users getting hooked on consuming news content via voice. We deployed the Matthew Newscaster around a year ago across all of our US English websites and turned it into our default voice. We definitely plan on rolling out the Lupe Newscaster style in our production environment and anticipate that users will listen to more content pieces for longer.”

You can use Lupe’s US Spanish Newscaster speaking style via the Amazon Polly console, AWS CLI, or AWS SDK. The feature is currently available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) Regions. For more information, see What Is Amazon Polly? For the full list of available voices, see Voices in Amazon Polly. Or log in to the Amazon Polly console to try it out for yourself!

Additionally, Lupe Newscaster and other selected Polly voices are now available to Alexa skill developers. For more information see New Alexa long form speaking style and Polly voices.

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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.

 

 

 

 

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