With more than 100 newsrooms across the country, it’s important for Gannett | USA Today Network to produce audio content efficiently. Scott Stein, Vice President of Content Ventures at Gannett says, “We strive to innovate and bring our audiences news and content wherever they are. Greg Doufas, Chief Technical and Digital Officer at The Globe and Mail This text-to-voice feature from AWS is miles ahead of anything we’ve heard to date. With the exceedingly high quality speech that Polly now offers, we’re even better equipped to deliver these exceptional listening experiences to our audience.” Stuart Johnson, Owner and CEO of Success magazine Success Magazine, Digital Edition using Amazon Polly NTTSĪmazon Polly Newscaster enables us to provide our readers with more features to further their experience with our newspaper. The trends increasingly show that consumers are gravitating toward audio content. Publishers like Gannett, The Globe and Mail, Success Magazine, TIM Media, Encyclopedia Britannica, and nonprofit education tech company CommonLit are some of the earliest users of Newscaster Style. It appears that NTTS and Newscaster Style may be a solution to this problem. Newman found that while news updates on smart speakers were actively used, they “were not greatly loved.” One of the reasons listed by Newman for this was the use of synthesized voices (text to speech), which many find hard to listen to. Reuters Institute’s November 2018 The Future of Voice and the Implications for News report states that penetration of voice-activated speakers is growing rapidly and is now reaching mainstream audiences.Īccording to the report author and Senior Research Associate at Reuters Institute, Nic Newman, “Voice could become a critical gateway to media going forward.”
This is an important update for publishers who are experimenting with the audio format to serve their readers.
Up to 1 million characters for Neural Text-To-Speech voices per month are free for the first 12 months, starting from the first request for speech (standard or NTTS). All sets include both male and female voices. The Newscaster Style is available for two US English voices. NTTS is now available for 11 voices which include 3 UK English voices, and 8 US English voices. We’re thrilled that our customers will get to listen to news and Wikipedia information from Alexa in this new way.” In January, Amazon had rolled out Newscaster Style to its Alexa enabled devices for daily briefings and Wikipedia snippet narrations.Īndrew Breen, Senior Manager with the TTS Research team at Amazon had said in a statement, “The ability to teach Alexa to adapt her speaking style based on the context of the customer’s request opens the possibility to deliver new and delightful experiences that were previously unthinkable. Julien Simon, Global Tech Evangelist at Amazon Web Services Adding Amazon Translate, they can also listen to articles that are automatically translated to a language they understand.
Thanks to Polly and the Newscaster Style, their readers (or should we say listeners now?) can enjoy articles read in a high-quality voice that sounds like what they might expect to hear on the TV or radio. So it will read a newscast, a sportscast, or a university class lecture in the style that human ears are accustomed to hearing each of them. According to Simon, Newscaster Style tailors the style of narration according to the content. The other new feature, Newscaster Style, makes narration sound very realistic whether it’s reading news articles or blog posts.