Set up Amazon Polly

Amazon Polly

We highly recommend you to use Amazon Polly as Text-to-Speech service of your audiobooks because of its speech quality and cost-effectiveness. While this is not a free service, if you're first to use AWS, you're eligible to the AWS Free Tier which allows you to turn 5 million characters per month into speech for free for the first 12 months. There is almost no worry for those who make audiobooks for language learning to exceed this limit. Even if you're not, pay-as-you-go $4.00 per 1 million characters for speech requests is probably quite affordable. You barely use the amount of 200,000 characters per month.

To see its pricing and create free account, see AWS official website

After successfully creating your Amazon Web Service (AWS) account, you have personal configurations of AWS. To activate Amazon Polly on Joytan, you need to make two files in a specific folder to store settings. The detail of this process is explained here.

The account credentials provide unlimited access to your AWS resources. Store your credentials securely, do not share it.

Step 1: Make a credentials file

Create your credentials file at

  ~/.aws/credentials

(On Windows)

  C:\Users\YOUR_USER_NAME\.aws\credentials

and save the following lines after replacing the placeholders with your own.

  [default]
  aws_access_key_id = YOUR_KEY
  aws_secret_access_key = YOUR_SECRET

Step 2: Make a config file

Next, create your config file at

  ~/.aws/config

(On Windows)

   C:\Users\YOUR_USER_NAME\.aws\config

and save the following lines.

  [default]
  region=us-east-1

Result

Now you can choose Amazon Polly as Text-to-Speech from Edit/Preferences/Text-to-Speech.

And also you should confirm that your AWS account is activated properly after using Amazon Polly for the first time. You can check the details of the AWS service charges from your AWS account dashboard

Screenshots of Amazon Polly configuration — Amazon Polly on Joytan

Screenshots of AWS dashboard — AWS Free Tier works properly