PHP Text to Speech via Amazon Polly API

Firstly what is Amazon Polly?

Well Amazon Polly is a service that turns text to voice, simple as that. While a big part of their focus is IOT, Amazon Polly can be used in a wide variety of applications: from education to content or even business management. Just imagine a Chef that takes his online orders via Amazon Echo.

What is great for this new service is that already comes with support for 24 languages (atm):

• Danish
• Dutch
• English (Australian)
• English (British)
• English (Indian)
• English (US)
• English (Welsh)
• French
• French (Canadian)
• German
• Icelandic
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Norwegian
• Polish
• Portuguese (Brazilian)
• Portuguese (European)
• Romanian
• Russian
• Spanish
• Spanish (Latin American)
• Swedish
• Turkish
• Welsh

And such a great product comes with API and PHP SDK that you can download here

The rest is pretty simple once we include the autoloader

require '/path/to/aws-autoloader.php';

Keep in mind that we will need to configure AWS Access Keys.

Creating Amazon Polly Client

use Aws\Polly\PollyClient;

$config = [
'version' => 'latest',
'region' => 'us-east-1', //region
'credentials' => [
  'key' => 'your aws access key',
  'secret' => 'your aws secret key',
  ]
];

$client = new PollyClient($config);

after we just need to configure the SynthesizeSpeech method with required parameters

$args = [
'OutputFormat' => 'mp3',
'Text' => "<speak><prosody rate='medium'>your text goes here..</prosody></speak>",
'TextType' => 'ssml',
'VoiceId' => "Joanna",
];

$result = $client->synthesizeSpeech($args);

$resultData = $result->get('AudioStream')->getContents();

Afterwards we just listen the output

$size   = strlen($resultData); // File size
$length = $size;           // Content length
$start  = 0;               // Start byte
$end    = $size - 1;       // End byte
header('Content-Transfer-Encoding:chunked');
header("Content-Type: audio/mpeg");
header("Accept-Ranges: 0-$length");
header("Content-Range: bytes $start-$end/$size");
header("Content-Length: $length");
echo $resultData;

Or we can download the mp3

header('Content-length: ' . strlen($resultData));
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="polly-text-to-speech.mp3"');
header('X-Pad: avoid browser bug');
header('Cache-Control: no-cache');
echo $resultData;