New Neural Text to Speech Voices from Amazon Polly

This is great Rick - add this as a feature request to Articulate and I've just done submitted mine.

Thanks for sharing.

Hi Rick. This is very cool! Thanks for sharing!

I concur with Wendy: it would be awesome of you to share this with a feature request if you haven't done so already. It just helps our team prioritize features, etc.

Yup. No problem. Done.

(BTW, Love the new changes to triggers and actions workflow). 

+1.

I am currently using the Google Wavenet voices as they are far superior to the Amazon Polly voices.  They sound more natural.  I use a Google Chrome add-in to play the speech of the text on the screen and record the audio to use inside Storyline.  It is definitely more work than the built-in text to speech, but the voices are far superior.  

+1

We spends thousands of dollars each year on professional narrators for our major elearning projects. Our clients like the results so using professionals is well worth our investment. However, for smaller learning activities, using professional narrators is not practical nor cost-effective.

So I was excited to discover neural voices. Although still not perfect, these voices are now good enough for use in some projects. One of our current projects is targeted at learners for whom English is not their first language. Research we did indicates that these learners prefer to learn by "listening" rather than by "reading. So as a result, I am using neural voices to narrate some of the lessons. 

Here is a sample micro-learning  lesson that we built using SL3 and neural voices.

Since I use StoryLine 3 (and not 360), the text-to-speech feature is not currently available to us. Fortunately, I was able to find a very affordable cloud-based service that allows me to easily create narration using a variety of neural and other voices. Once the conversion is done, I simply download them for insertion into StoryLine and other programs.

For other StoryLine 3 users who may be interested in trying out this service, you can find out more information here. (I am not a big fan of all of the hype and sales approach at this website / vendor. However, I have subscribed to the service and the bottom line is that is works!)

I hope that this information may be useful with your elearning projects. Thanks.

Russ

UPDATE: I just discovered that I can further improve the quality of the neural voice output by running the audio file through a program called Auphonic Leveler. I have used this software for years with my narrations. It does a great job in "leveling" the audio volume and cleaning up the noise. It does involve an extra step, but I believe it is well worth the effort.

Thanks for sharing Russ. Really great.  You can also register with your Amazon account for Amazon Polly and they have a page where you can enter in text and download clips the same way for free as well. 

Although Neural voices are not supported inside of Storyline yet, I have created an application that can help streamline the process if you use Amazon Polly directly like Rick talks about in his post here.

1.       You’ll need an Amazon Polly account (https://aws.amazon.com/polly/)
2.       Save your scripts to be encoded as separate files (MS Word or Text)
3.       Download HeroVoice TTS from the Microsoft Windows Store
          (fully functioning 15-day free trial)
4.       Encode your script files using HeroVoice TTS
5.       Load each audio file into Storyline

HeroVoice TTS supports many of the requests that I’ve seen on the Storyline forums including:

·         Adjusting the overall speed of your files with one setting
·         Adjusting the overall pause duration for commas
·         Adding your own SSML tags to get more finer nuanced, naturally sounding results
·         Neural voices
·         Batch processing your script files 

Thor's application is a really useful tool. I've tried it out and if you want to get better quality Neural voices in your project, this is the easiest way to do it!