Amazon Polly
Available amazon/polly · by Amazon · neural-tts
Pricing — 1 offering(s)
Amazon Web Services
Standard voices
- $4.00 / 1M characters Current 2016-11-01 → present
Neural voices (NTTS)
- $16.00 / 1M characters Current 2019-11-01 → present
Long-form voices
- $100.00 / 1M characters Current 2023-11-01 → present
Showing the active price and any recorded history. Full pricing history is available via the paid API — see API docs.
Capability profile
voice naturalness moderate
language support strong
voice variety moderate
streaming latency strong
cloning support weak
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Score | Config | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| MOS (naturalness) | — | No independently published MOS for Polly Neural. Community comparisons generally rate it below Azure and Google Neural for naturalness, but suitable for most production use cases. | — |
Operator guidance
Best for teams running AWS-native infrastructure. At $16/1M chars (Neural) it is price-identical to Azure and Google Neural2. The 12-month free tier (5M chars/month) is the most generous among major cloud providers for new accounts. Long-form voices ($100/1M) are a niche premium for audiobook production. For voice cloning, choose ElevenLabs or PlayHT. For real-time conversational AI latency, choose Cartesia Sonic.
Use cases
- App TTS within AWS-native architectures (Lambda, EC2, Step Functions)
- Audiobook and podcast narration using Long-form voices
- Cost-optimised TTS at scale with the 12-month free tier
- Multi-language applications in the major world languages covered
Limitations
- Narrower language coverage than Azure (140+) and Google (40+)
- Neural voice quality is competitive but not best-in-class
- No voice cloning or custom voice training