Take It Further - Production Guidance

Understand what changes for production text-to-speech accessibility

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Understand what changes for production text-to-speech accessibility

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Ready for Production?

You've explored voice synthesis. Now understand what changes when moving to a production deployment serving accessible council content.

This is guidance, not implementation. Use this information to inform your accessibility strategy and technical planning.

The demo synthesizes on-demand. Production systems need caching strategies and batch processing for efficiency.

Content Volume: Content volume: pre-generate for static pages, real-time for dynamic
Caching: Caching strategy: hash-based keys prevent regeneration of unchanged content
Languages: Multi-language: consider Welsh voices for bilingual councils
Batch Processing: Batch processing: generate audio during off-peak hours for cost efficiency

The demo uses default settings. Production deployments are customized to your council's brand voice and accessibility requirements.

Customization	Description	Effort Estimate
Voice Selection	Voice selection: choose voices matching your council's brand	1-2 days
SSML Templates	SSML templates: create reusable templates for common content types	3-5 days
Pronunciation	Pronunciation dictionary: maintain list of local terms and phonemes	Ongoing
Player Styling	Audio player styling: match to council website accessibility standards	2-3 days

Costs scale with content volume and engine choice. Here's a comparison between this demo and a typical production deployment (1M characters/month).

Service	Demo Costs	Production Costs (1M chars/month)
Polly Neural		$40-100/month (1M chars/month)
Polly Standard		$10-25/month (1M chars/month)
Amazon S3		$5-10/month
AWS Lambda		$5-10/month
Total	No cost to your council	$60-145/month (neural) or $30-55/month (standard)

Note: Neural voices cost ~4x more but sound significantly more natural. Consider neural for public-facing content.

The demo prioritizes ease of exploration. Production deployments need additional security measures for serving audio content.

Presigned URLs with short expiry (1 hour)

S3 bucket policy restricting direct access

Lambda function with minimal IAM permissions

CloudFront for high-traffic audio delivery

Content sanitization before synthesis

Rate limiting to prevent abuse