ANZ Pied Piper

"Polly" is an ingeniously named AWS service that allows you get convert text to a sound file. It is part of the AI portfolio. Another example that we will see in another post is "Rekognition". Long time ago if you wanted to do these kind of tasks you would have to build your own models with lots of samples, train them, improve them and so on. It is impossible to cater for every AI use case in this fashion but the ones related to human senses such as speech, hearing and vision are being already offered by most cloud providers today. These services are conveniently accessed by an API Although the service has the name of a parrot it provides multiple voices with different accents. Each voice has a different person name, ex: "Joanna". Surprisingly it even includes some children voices in some languages. It would be awesome if they also offered a good strong Irish accent ... it would make a good addition to a joke-telling app running in a smart beer fridge

This will be a short article presenting a video we created for the past Tech Summit for Australia and New Zealand. The opportunity was too good to let it go. Daniel had created the Piklok as his personal project during the Pied Piper program. This was a talking clock that leverages AWS Polly service to interact with users. Daniel had been given a Google Home on father's day so we thought we could do a fun video for the event where the Piklok interviews Google Home and Alexa. However in the end we could not get an Amazon device on time and we were too tied up with the final touches for the app. In fact, Daniel didn't finish editing the video until the last night of the event. Anyway we hope you enjoy the video