Amazon Polly alternatives

What to consider when choosing an Amazon Polly alternative (a cloud provider speech service), built from Amazon Polly's public pages as of October 10, 2026. ReadAloud, which we make, is one disclosed option among several.

Last verified October 10, 2026.

We make ReadAloud, so it appears below as one of the options, and we say so. Options are listed alphabetically, not ranked.

Who Amazon Polly suits

We file Amazon Polly under cloud provider speech services: speech is one product among many in a larger cloud account, with its own console, billing and permissions. It lists a price per character. The audience its pages name: teams on AWS who need high-volume speech for IVR, notifications or accessibility, plus speech marks metadata and HIPAA-eligible handling.

What Amazon Polly lists as strengths

Conditions to check with Amazon Polly

How Amazon Polly prices

In Amazon Polly's words: Pay per character of text converted to speech or Speech Marks, billed monthly; cached and replayed generated speech is free.

  • Standard: $4 per 1M characters. Free tier 5 million characters per month. Confirmed by AWS price list (us-east-1) at $0.000004 per character. (source: aws.amazon.com)
  • Neural: $16 per 1M characters. Free tier 1 million characters per month for the first 12 months. AWS price list confirms $0.000016 per character. (source: aws.amazon.com)
  • Generative: $30 per 1M characters. Applies to speech requests. Free tier 100 thousand characters per month for the first 12 months. AWS price list confirms $0.00003 per character. (source: aws.amazon.com)
  • Long-Form: $100 per 1M characters. Free tier 500 thousand characters per month for the first 12 months. AWS price list confirms $0.0001 per character. (source: aws.amazon.com)

Check the difference between voice classes, whether the free allowance renews monthly or runs out once, and what the account minimums and regional prices are.

Amazon Polly's Standard at $4 matches ReadAloud Live at $4 per 1M characters.

Amazon Polly's Neural at $16, Generative at $30 and Long-Form at $100 are higher than ReadAloud Live.

Amazon Polly's Standard at $4 is lower than ReadAloud Studio at $10 per 1M characters, so on list price per character Amazon Polly costs less there.

Amazon Polly's Neural at $16, Generative at $30 and Long-Form at $100 are higher than ReadAloud Studio.

Free tier at Amazon Polly: Standard: 5M characters per month; Neural: 1M per month for 12 months; Long-Form: 500K per month for 12 months; Generative: 100K per month for 12 months. New AWS customers (from July 15, 2025) also receive up to $200 in Free Tier credits (free plan for 6 months, credits usable within 12 months).

Voices and languages

Amazon Polly: languages listed: 42 language and language-variant rows in the available-voices table; custom voices: Brand Voice: custom voice built with AWS on request via an AWS account manager or contact form; cost and timeline scoped per engagement. No self-serve cloning stated on pages read.

Account, compliance and data handling

Amazon Polly's pages mention HIPAA. Self-attested: Polly FAQ states it is a HIPAA Eligible Service covered under the AWS Business Associate Addendum. SOC 2 and GDPR not found on pages read. ReadAloud does not claim HIPAA, SOC 2, GDPR or other certifications. If you need one of them, ask the vendors you are considering what they can show you.

Limits and formats

  • Per request: SynthesizeSpeech: up to 3,000 billed characters (6,000 total; SSML tags not billed); output stream limited to 10 minutes. Longer text uses asynchronous speech synthesis tasks. (source: docs.aws.amazon.com)
  • Concurrency: SynthesizeSpeech: Standard 80 tps (80 concurrent), Neural 8 tps (18 concurrent), Long-Form 8 tps (26 concurrent), Generative 8 tps (26 concurrent). (source: docs.aws.amazon.com)
  • Output formats listed: mp3, ogg_vorbis, ogg_opus, pcm (16-bit mono little-endian), mulaw, alaw and json (speech marks).
  • SSML is listed as supported.

What we could not confirm about Amazon Polly

  • Total voice count (table lists voices per language; not summed)
  • SDK languages (AWS SDK list not read)
  • WebSocket support (bidirectional streaming described over HTTP/2)
  • Quantified latency
  • SOC 2 and GDPR statements
  • Whether quotas are adjustable
  • OpenAI-compatible mode (none found)

What to consider when choosing an Amazon Polly alternative

  • Price your monthly characters on each Amazon Polly tier you would use.
  • Decide whether you need audio to start before the whole text is sent. If you do, check that the service you pick streams input as well as output.
  • Amazon Polly's per-request limit is stated as: SynthesizeSpeech: up to 3,000 billed characters (6,000 total; SSML tags not billed); output stream limited to 10 minutes. Longer text uses asynchronous speech synthesis tasks. Compare it with the length of your longest text and plan how you will split it. (source: docs.aws.amazon.com)
  • If you rely on SSML for pauses or pronunciation, note that Amazon Polly lists support for it and that ReadAloud does not accept SSML.

Options besides Amazon Polly

Three other vendors from our dataset, chosen because they share Amazon Polly's category or pricing model, and ReadAloud, which we make. They are listed alphabetically, not ranked, and each summary comes from that vendor's own pages.

  • Google Cloud Text-to-Speech

    Google Cloud Text-to-Speech is also a cloud provider speech service, and it lists a price per character as Amazon Polly does.

    Reviewed 2026-10-10 (source: cloud.google.com)

  • Microsoft Azure AI Speech

    Microsoft Azure AI Speech is also a cloud provider speech service, and it lists a price per character as Amazon Polly does. Microsoft Azure AI Speech lists WebSocket streaming.

    Reviewed 2026-10-10 (source: azure.microsoft.com)

  • ReadAloud

    A streaming text-to-speech API: ReadAloud Live at $4 and ReadAloud Studio at $10 per 1M characters. English today.

    Disclosure: this is our product

  • Unreal Speech

    Unreal Speech is a text-to-speech API platform rather than a cloud provider speech service like Amazon Polly, and it lists a price per character as Amazon Polly does. Unreal Speech lists WebSocket streaming.

    Reviewed 2026-10-10 (source: unrealspeech.com)

How ReadAloud differs from Amazon Polly

Amazon Polly's per-character figures are in the pricing list above, next to ReadAloud Live at $4 and ReadAloud Studio at $10. Live: one American English voice. Studio: several English voices. Requests are limited to 5,000 characters.

Details about Amazon Polly come from its public pages as they were on October 10, 2026. Amazon Polly may have changed them since, and a page that was unclear to us may be clear to you. Corrections: support@readaloudai.org. We make ReadAloud, so read this page with that in mind and check anything important with Amazon Polly directly.

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