Hello Polly!

[Leitz]

NOTE: If you're not a computer geek, this will make even less sense than most of the other drivel I write.
You have been warned!

If you want to add a little immersion to your games, AWS Polly is a multilingual text to speech synthesizer. Imagine your players sitting down to get their next "mission brief", and some voice audibly gives them the details, mentioning them by name, talking about previous actions, etc. How would that feel?

Polly is available on the AWS Free Tier, and even paid for stuff doesn't cost much. Install the AWS CLI for your OS, and then try this:

Code: Select all

aws polly synthesize-speech --text-type ssml --text '<speak><lang xml:lang="en-GB">All your PC are belong to us</lang></speak>' --output-format mp3 --voice-id Tatyana speech.mp3

Play the MP3 and see how you like it.

Note that this is a bit of a complex example, Tatyana is a Russian speaking voice. The XML tags tell her to speak in British English, but she still has a Russian accent. For normal text, remove the <tags>.

[tibbius]

Nice. I will keep this in mind, at least somewhere in the back ... it might be fun to try it out.