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

[jim_chapman]

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

Text-to-speech in Windows is a messy business - and not all installed voices are available to all applications. Moreover there are specific limitations that apply to UWP (Universal Windows Platform) apps like Freda. (If you want to explore this mess, you can Google terms like UWP, SAPI 5 Voice, Core Voice and the like - and look into the distinction between 32-bit and 64-bit voices ... and find various dangerous suggestions for messing with your machine's registry. But the bottom line is: just because some installer utility says that a certain voice is 'installed' that doesn't mean that Freda can use it).

Freda gets its list of available text-to-speech voices by doing: "from voice in SpeechSynthesizer.AllVoices select voice". So it's working from a list of all the voices that the Windows 10 Operating System has decided to make available to UWP applications. I don't know why the Amazon Polly voices are not on that list but (per the 'messy business' point) there are many possible reasons for it - and only Amazon could tell us what is going on. I did a quick search of their on-line documentation, and did not find anything informative.