Neural TTS - Amazon Polly

Neural TTS

Amazon Polly has a Neural TTS (NTTS) system that can produce even higher quality voices than its standard voices. The NTTS system produces the most natural and human-like text-to-speech voices possible.

Standard TTS voices use concatenative synthesis. This method strings together (concatenates) the phonemes of recorded speech, producing very natural-sounding synthesized speech. However, the inevitable variations in speech and the techniques used to segment the waveforms limits the quality of speech.

The Amazon Polly Neural TTS system doesn't use standard concatenative synthesis to produce speech. It has two parts:

  • A neural network that converts a sequence of phonemes—the most basic units of language—into a sequence of spectrograms, which are snapshots of the energy levels in different frequency bands

  • A vocoder, which converts the spectrograms into a continuous audio signal.

The first component of the neural TTS system is a sequence-to-sequence model. This model doesn’t create its results solely from the corresponding input but also considers how the sequence of the elements of the input work together. The model chooses the spectrograms that it outputs so that their frequency bands emphasize acoustic features that the human brain uses when processing speech.

The output of this model then passes to a neural vocoder. This converts the spectrograms into speech waveforms. When trained on the large data sets used to build general-purpose concatenative-synthesis systems, this sequence-to-sequence approach will yield higher-quality, more natural-sounding voices.

With the exception of the Kevin voice (US English, en-US), all NTTS voices also have a counterpart created using the standard TTS method. The Kevin voice is only supported by Amazon Polly when using NTTS. When using the Kevin voice (or any other NTTS-only voice), the TTS engine parameter must be set to neural, whether using the console or API.

Feature and Region Compatibility

Neural voices aren't available in all AWS Regions, nor do they support all Amazon Polly features.

Neural voices are supported in the following Regions:


US West (Oregon): us-west-2

Asia Pacific (Tokyo): ap-northeast-1

Asia Pacific (Singapore): ap-southeast-1

Asia Pacific (Sydney): ap-southeast-2

Europe (Frankfurt): eu-central-1

Europe (Ireland): eu-west-1

Europe (London): eu-west-2

Endpoints and protocols for these Regions are identical to those used for standard voices. For more information, see Regions and Endpoints.

The following features are supported for neural voices:

  • Real-time and asynchronous speech synthesis operations.

  • Newscaster and Conversational speaking styles. (For more information about the apeaking styles, see NTTS Speaking Styles.)

  • All speechmarks.

  • Many (but not all) of the SSML tags that are supported by Amazon Polly. (For more information about NTTS-supported SSML tags, see Supported SSML Tags.)

As with standard voices, you can choose from various sampling rates to optimize the bandwidth and audio quality for your application. Valid sampling rates for standard and neural voices are 8 kHz, 16 kHz, 22 kHz, or 24 kHz. The default for standard voices is 22 kHz. The default for neural voices is 24 kHz. Amazon Polly supports MP3, OGG (Vorbis), and raw PCM audio stream formats.

The Voice Engine

Amazon Polly enables you to use either neural or standard voice with the engine property. It has two possible values: Standard or Neural, indicating whether to use a standard or neural voice. Standard is the default value.

If you are not in one of the four regions where NTTS is supported, only the standard voice engine will be displayed in the console. If the neural engine is not displayed, check your region. For more information on the regions where NTTS can be used, see Feature and Region Compatibility.


Choosing the Voice Engine (Console)

To choose a voice engine (console)

  1. Open the Amazon Polly console at

  2. On the Text-to-Speech page, for Engine, choose Standard or Neural.

                            The Engine option on the console
                                Text-to-Speech page.

    If you choose Neural, only neural voices are available and standard-only voices are disabled.

Choosing the Voice Engine (CLI)

To choose a voice engine (CLI)

The engine parameter is optional, with two possible values: standard or Neural. Use this property when creating a SynthesisSynthesisTask operation.

For example, you can use the following code to run the start-speech-synthesis-task AWS CLI command in the US West-2 (Oregon) region


aws polly start-speech-synthesis-task \ --engine neural --region us-west-2 \ --endpoint-url "" \ --output-format mp3 \ --output-s3-bucket-name your-bucket-name \ --output-s3-key-prefix optional/prefix/path/file \ --voice-id Joanna \ --text file://text_file.txt

This will result in a response that looks similar to this:

"SynthesisTask": { "CreationTime": [..], "Engine": "neural", "OutputFormat": "mp3", "OutputUri": "<task_id>.mp3", "TextType": "text", "RequestCharacters": [..], "TaskStatus": "scheduled", "TaskId": [task_id], "VoiceId": "Joanna" }