AWS announces Hindi Language support for Amazon Polly

Amazon Web Services, Inc. has announced the addition of Hindi language support for Amazon Polly, a machine learning service that turns text into lifelike speech allowing users to create applications that talk and build new categories of speech-enabled products. With the addition of Hindi language support, the company now has its first bilingual voice for Amazon Polly. Aditi, first released as an Indian English voice to the Amazon Polly portfolio in November 2017, now also speaks fluent Hindi.

Aditi and Raveena are the two Indian English voices currently available on Amazon Polly, along with a variety of other voices in multiple languages to synthesize speech from text. Hindi, according to the 2011 Census of India, is spoken by over 500 million people worldwide. The addition of Hindi language support for Amazon Polly will enhance the experience for Indian customers.

Organizations are using the new bilingual Indian English/Hindi voice to enhance automated customer engagement applications, interactive voice responses (IVR), audio news, and targeted vernacular language services.

One of India’s largest insurance marketplaces, PolicyBazaar.com, is using Amazon Polly’s bilingual support for their in-house interactive voice response (IVR) calling service and is looking to innovate further with the new release.

“Amazon Polly’s launch of Hindi language support is a real game changer for us,” said Ashish Gupta, CTO Policybazaar.com & CEO- DocPrime.com. “We are already using the Hindi capability for our IVR and automated outbound updates to customers, and we saw an increase in engagement with these messages. Soon, we will be releasing a Hindi voice-bot that will enhance our customers’ experience further by providing 24x7 service.”

Duolingo, a popular language-learning platform and the most downloaded education app in the world with over 200 million users, is an AWS customer that uses Amazon Polly. Offering more than 80 courses in 31 languages, the application makes learning simple and fun by gamifying the entire experience. Duolingo recently unveiled its latest Hindi course for English speakers, which was developed using Amazon Polly’s new Aditi voice.

"In launching Duolingo's new Hindi course, it was important to find a text-to-speech solution that would help our users learn the language as effectively as possible,” said Natalie Glance, VP of Engineering at Duolingo. “Amazon Polly's Aditi Hindi voice fit our needs perfectly because of its exceptional quality and natural-sounding voice. We are looking forward to continuing to work with Amazon Polly on more text-to-speech solutions in the future."

“Today, there is a demand for content in Hindi and Indian English across all genres of voice applications – from training videos to e-Learning, corporate narrations, voice bots, and more. Amazon Polly makes it easy to switch between languages and voices, based on the customer’s requirements. We introduced the bilingual support in response to requests from customers for high-quality speech synthesis in both Hindi and Indian English, especially in scenarios where the two languages are mixed together and spoken. Customers can now provide mixed input in a variety of dialects including Devanagari Hindi, Romanized Hindi, and English, as well as complete Hindi text input in Devanagari script,” said Navdeep Manaktala, Head of Business Development at Amazon Internet Services Private Limited (AISPL).

Amazon Polly is an AWS service that turns text into lifelike speech, allowing users to create applications that talk and build entirely new categories of speech-enabled products. Using advanced deep learning technologies to synthesize speech that sounds like a human voice, Amazon Polly provides dozens of languages and a wide selection of natural-sounding male and female voices. Amazon Polly's fluid pronunciation of text enables customers to deliver high-quality voice output for a global audience.

Amazon Polly is available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region. For a list of regions where Amazon Polly is available, see the AWS Region table. First-time Amazon Polly customers can try the service by using the AWS Free Tier.