Amazon Polly Text-to-Speech

Amazon Polly Demo — Preview AWS Neural & Standard Voices Online

As Amazons commercial offering Polly is a solid contender (as you would probably expect), having access to large scale data for LLM training. What might surprise you is that for the first 12 months you can get Polly completely for free with your AWS account.

How many voices do you get?

Amazon Polly gives you access to dozens of voices across a wide range of languages and accents, including English (US & UK), Spanish, French, German, Japanese, and more. You can choose between Standard voices and more natural-sounding Neural voices. For a full list of Polly's voice offerings you can check out their documentation.

Voice cloning

Polly does not offer voice cloning (the ability to replicate a specific human voice). If this is essential, you’ll need to consider other providers.

Voice creation

Polly supports custom lexicons (to fix tricky pronunciations) and full SSML support, letting you adjust pitch, speed, emphasis, and pauses. Great for corporate use cases where you may be dealing with internal phrasing, abbreaviations or words - however, it doesn’t offer true custom voice creation or training like some newer TTS platforms.

How much does it cost?

With a new AWS account, Polly is free for the first 12 months, then $4 per 1 million characters for Standard voices and $16 per 1 million characters for Neural"

What do you get for the price?

• Reliable scaling inside the AWS ecosystem (Console, CLI, SDKs)
• Access to both Neural and Standard voices
• SSML fine-tuning for better control
• Reliable performace at scale, very capable of handling use cases like audiobooks
• Neural & standard voices across dozens of languages and accents
• SSML controls for pitch, rate, emphasis, and pauses
• Custom lexicons for brand and technical terms
• Streaming or downloadable MP3/OGG output
• Pay-as-you-go pricing; AWS free tier for new accounts

How does the voice quality compare?

Amazon Polly’s Neural voices are strong, clear, and reliable, though some competitors like Microsoft Azure and ElevenLabs are often rated as more natural or expressive for human-like delivery. Still, Polly is a dependable, developer-friendly option, especially if you’re already in AWS.

In-depth Walkthrough

Compare with our ElevenLabs Text-to-Speech and Microsoft Azure Text-to-Speech pages, or explore the full TTS providers directory.