First bilingual voice support: Aditi, a female voice that now supports both Hindi and Indian English; the Amazon Polly portfolio now includes 53 voices across 26 languages, available globally in 14 AWS Regions
Amazon Web Services 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 24×7 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.
