The sound of the news, with Amazon Tech tested by Washington Post
The Washington Post announced it has started experimenting with audio articles using Amazon Polly, which Amazon describes as a service that "turns text into lifelike speech," but that might be something more.
If you are thinking of an awkward computer voice, you’re out of line.
Amazon Polly aims to sound like a friendly voice; it speaks like a human voice telling a story.
To achieve this goal, Polly uses advanced technologies and includes 47 voices across 24 different languages.
What’s the point? Is it just a way to convert articles into lifelike speech or are we talking about a change of the traditional journalism?
“This is a new technology that can give users more choice and better accessibility to our content, so we wanted to create an experiment to dive deeper into the user experience,”
said Joseph Price, product manager at The Post.
“After a month, we’ll take what we’ve learned about how users engage with this feature to develop our first iteration of a product with Amazon Polly.”
At the moment, The Post said it's only testing the tech, for the next month, mobile users will be able to listen to an audio version of four articles daily across business, lifestyle, technology and entertainment news categories.
But the future develops might have some promises, the publication said it hopes to include "personalized playlists" -- think Spotify -- as well as integration with its mobile apps."
