Amazon Polly Whispers

Amazon Polly is a powerful text-to-speech service powered by a deep learning engine. But while Polly can say just about anything, sometimes she needs to say it a little bit quieter.

Vogels revealed an upgrade that imbues Polly with her whisper voice. Another upgrade makes it possible to use punctuation marks to sync speech movements of an avatar to the actual syllables of Polly's utterances.

Both features were demonstrated during Vogel's keynote by a slightly eerie avatar—a computer-rendered woman with flowing black hair—sharing a tale with the audience that required some whispering at a critical moment.