How Text-to-Speech Works

Choose your path: a visual tour with diagrams, or a hands-on console tour exploring the AWS infrastructure.

Architecture Tours

Visual Architecture Tour

Understand the text-to-speech synthesis pipeline

5 minutes

  1. Text Input

    User provides text content, optionally with SSML markup. Voice and engine selection determine synthesis parameters.

  2. Amazon Polly Processing

    Polly receives the request, selects the appropriate neural or standard engine, and synthesizes audio using deep learning models.

  3. Audio Generation

    Speech is generated as an audio stream in MP3 format. Neural voices use more compute but produce more natural results.

  4. S3 Storage

    Generated audio is stored in S3 with appropriate cache headers. Repeated requests for the same content serve from cache.

  5. Presigned URL

    A time-limited URL is generated for secure audio playback without exposing S3 directly.

  6. Audio Playback

    The HTML5 audio player streams content to the user, with download option for offline accessibility.

Console Architecture Tour

Explore the actual AWS resources powering text-to-speech

8 minutes Requires deployed stack

  1. Amazon Polly Console

    What to look for: Available voices, neural engine options, SSML examples, usage metrics

    Open AWS Console

  2. S3 Audio Bucket

    What to look for: Audio file storage, cache headers, file naming patterns, storage costs

    Open AWS Console

  3. Lambda Function

    What to look for: Synthesis function code, environment variables for voice selection, CloudWatch logs

    Open AWS Console

  4. CloudWatch Metrics

    What to look for: Polly character count, synthesis latency, error rates

    Open AWS Console

What's Next?

Test the Limits

Long text, non-English, and special characters.

Try challenges

Production Guidance

Learn what changes for accessibility integration.

View guidance