Amazon Polly is the AWS text-to-speech service with Standard, Neural, Long-Form and Generative voices, billed per character. The free tier covers 5 million Standard characters a month; Neural voices cost $16 per million characters.
Amazon Polly is a fully managed AWS service that converts text into speech on demand. Developers send text, such as articles, web pages or documents, and receive an audio stream or file, choosing from dozens of voices across many languages. Each voice is built from native speakers, and most languages include several voices. Polly offers four voice types: Standard, Neural, Long-Form for extended narration, and Generative. It can also return Speech Marks, metadata that lines up words and sentences with the audio. News publishers such as The Washington Post and USA Today Network are named as customers.
Billing is per character processed, monthly. Outside the free tier, Standard voices cost $4 per million characters, Neural voices $16, Generative voices $30 and Long-Form voices $100. Generated speech can be cached and replayed at no extra charge. The free tier includes 5 million Standard characters per month, and for the first 12 months 1 million Neural, 500,000 Long-Form and 100,000 Generative characters per month. Since July 2025, new AWS customers can also receive up to $200 in AWS Free Tier credits that apply to Polly, and the free plan runs for six months after account creation.
Polly is aimed at developers. You need an AWS account and use the console, SDK or API rather than a voiceover editor, and the pricing page notes that a single page of text costs a fraction of a cent on Standard voices.
The free tier includes 5 million Standard characters per month, and for the first 12 months 1 million Neural, 500,000 Long-Form and 100,000 Generative characters per month. After that, usage is billed per character.
Neural voices cost $16 per million characters outside the free tier. Standard voices are $4, Generative $30 and Long-Form $100 per million characters.
Website: https://aws.amazon.com/polly/
Company: Amazon Web Services
AWS per-character text-to-speech API with Standard, Neural, Long-Form and Generative voices and a large free tier. Developer setup needed. Neural $16 per million characters; Standard $4.
| Pricing model | Freemium |
|---|---|
| Free tier | Yes · 5M Standard chars/month; first 12 months: 1M Neural, 500K Long-Form, 100K Generative per month |
| Starting price | Not verified |
| Data residency | Not verified |
| Compliance (as stated by vendor) | Not verified |
| Integrations | Not verified |
| Public API | Yes |
| Self-hostable | No |
| Official site | Not verified |
| Can a general AI assistant replace it? | Chatbot voice modes cannot batch-convert thousands of articles to audio files. Use Polly for programmatic narration inside AWS-based apps. |
| Last verified | 2026-10-12 by editor |
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