Mozilla Uses Amazon Polly To Give Its Pocket App A Human-Sounding Voice

In a world where we are bombarded with just too much information, saving something for later reading, is certainly a solution for many.

The Pocket app. or previously known as Read It Later, is an application and web service for managing a reading list of articles from the internet. Owned by Mozilla since February 2017, the app boasts a handful of feature that should make bookmarking things from the web just easier.

Pocket has a text-to-speech feature so users you could listen to an audio version of their saved articles, instead of reading them. While they can be good for users who want to catch up with some reading fast, they're not that ideal because text-to-speech engines often sound too robotic

Starting with Pocket version 7, Mozilla uses Amazon Polly to give Pocket a more human sounding voice.

Polly from Amazon uses machine learning technologies to deliver more life-like speech. Polly also understands words in context, and its technology supports speech marks, a timbre effect, and dynamic range compression, among other things.

To use this updated "Listen" feature, users just need to tap on the headphone icon on the Pocket app to start listening to Polly reading their saved articles. Tapping on the gear icon allows users to control the text-to-speech feature, with "Best-quality voices" are enabled by default, and the users' language and voice are assigned automatically.

If users want to choose different languages or voices, they need to uncheck the box next to "Stream best-quality voices" and tap Language or Voice to make their selections. There are nine voices and dozens of languages to choose from.

It’s like your own personalized podcast, Mozilla notes.

Discussing the release, Mark Mayo, Chief Product Officer of Firefox, said that:

"At Mozilla, we love the web. Sometimes we want to surf, and the Firefox team has been working on ways to surf like an absolute champ with features like Firefox Advance. Sometimes, though, we want to settle down and read or listen to a few great pages. That’s where Pocket shines, and the new Pocket makes it even easier to enjoy the best of the web when you’re on the go in your own focused and uncluttered space. I love it."

While the feature certainly gets the upgrade it needs, users shouldn't expect a flawless listening experience. Polly that uses AI learns from the things it reads, but still the internet has too many extraneous text users might not want to hear.

As a result, voices can stumble over things like unfamiliar words and acronyms.

The voice quality may not beat professional reader of audio books, but in reality, its better than no voice at all. In fact, it's better than Pocket's previous text-to-speech engine.

In addition to Polly, the Pocket app is also having a redesign which gives it a cleaner and less clutter look-and-feel. There is also an app-wide dark mode and sepia themes, for those who want a different Pocket reading experience.

The redesign also includes updated typography and fonts, focused on making long reads more comfortable.

Published: 
12/10/2018