Add Amazon Polly Support **PUH-LEEEEZZE** !!! :-)

[jwhitten]

jim_chapman pid='11017' dateline='1585813914']Revisiting this question briefly-- when I originally asked it, I was thinking about the possibility of adding the Amazon Polly API into Freda to interact with Amazon Polly directly, via Amazon.

BUT -- in thinking it over... When you install Amazon Polly on your system, the voices get installed into the Windows Text-to-Speech system, meaning that if you use the drop-down, the Amazon Polly voices are listed (see screenshots).

But when I go into Freda, all I see are the three default voices that Microsoft delivered. Why isn't Freda showing the Amazon Polly voices? Did you just hard-code the MS default voices?

I guess my question is, Why isn't Freda working with the Amazon Polly voices as installed??

Thanks!!

John Whitten


   

   


Thank you for the suggestion, and for looking into the implementation details.  It is certainly something that I would want to keep an eye on.  But just now, I think it's the commercial aspect that would be the big problem.  If I understand Amazon's pricing model, I would need to pay several dollars, whenever a Freda user got the program to read one book aloud, using a Polly voice.  So imagining that, in the course of one month, all my users might between them read a hundred books aloud in Freda, I am facing a cost of several thousand dollars a year.

I can't just swallow that cost, but it would be tricky to find a way to pass it on to the people who are actually using the Polly voices.  It would mean adding a new pay-per-use feature to the app, and then trying to balance it so that it did actually recover the amount the right amount of money.  Then there is also the work involved in API integration.  My past experience of integrating text-to-speech APIs is that even the simple ones take hours to get right, and with Amazon Polly I have the added complication of a dependency on an AWS cloud service.  That brings in all sorts of error cases (e.g. any API call might fail because the internet connection is unavailable or interrupted).

That adds up to quite a lot of work, and at the end of the day I am not sure that many people would actually use it, once they realised they had to pay for it (I think that the cost of the feature would come out at around ten cents per hour of reading).

So right now, I am afraid it doesn't look like something I'll be doing soon.  But please do feel free to get back to me if you see some solution that I am missing - and thanks, in any case, for your engagement!