Case Study: The Washington Post improves news audio pronunciation with Amazon Polly

The Washington Post uses Amazon Polly’s 60+ voices to customize pronunciation for news articles

The Washington Post, a major news organization, utilizes Amazon Polly, a text-to-speech service, to convert written articles into audio for its readers. A key challenge was ensuring the accurate pronunciation of specialized words, names, and local dialect terms that are not part of standard lexicons, which is crucial for maintaining the quality and credibility of their audio content.

Amazon Polly addressed this by implementing custom lexicons, which allow for the precise definition of phonetic pronunciations for specific words. This solution enabled The Washington Post to achieve consistent and accurate audio output at scale, eliminating the need for manual SSML tagging in every article. The result is a more efficient and reliable text-to-speech process that delivers a high-quality listening experience to their audience.

The Washington Post