1. Text to Speech using AWS Polly
developed by Stuart James (ESRF)
presented by Andy Götz (ESRF)

2. Robots are coming …
R.U.R. is a 1920 science fiction play by the Czech writer Karel Čapek. R.U.R. stands for Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti (Rossum’s Universal Robots)

3. History of Project
ESRF had a TextTalker (TTS device server) for alarm messages in the control room since the beginning of the ESRF
Based on Microsoft TTS SDK it required having a Windows PC
Recent Windows TTS SDK was not as good and we wanted to avoid Windows
Looked for a long time for a Linux alternative. Found many solutions but most had mediocre voices (even Festival)
Last year discovered Amazon’s AWS Polly service – a low-cost cloud service for converting text to speech with high quality voices and many languages

4. AWS Polly – a cloud web service
Client APIs exist for Python, C++, Java, …
Text conversion takes < 500 ms
$4.00 per 1 million characters for speech (~23 hours)
5 million characters free per month for first 12 months

5. TextToSpeech architecture

6. TextToSpeech device server
An advanced device server written for converting text to speech based on the AWS Polly service
Written in C++, uses Pulse api for audio
Caches messages to limit number of calls to Polly
Keeps statistics and track of messages converted to speech
Device classes catalogue entry:

7. TextTo Speech Flow Control

8. Device server C++ notes
TTS library is 100% unit tested
Using pkg-config to configure tango
Code checking with clang
Depends on C++14 (uses futures)
Try it !