AWS Polly GUI

Although learning and book knowledge are the best, my personal relationship with reading activity is not the friendliest. Being focused on the text is a huge struggle and I often need to re-read sentences to actually read it. That's why sometimes I use text-to-speech (TTS) software or service.

Few years ago I discovered an Ivona Text-to-speech software which was far superior to any other TTS solution. It was able to quickly read out loud (and clear) text from my clipboard. Not only it was better than others but also it supported Polish - my language. Even though the default software wasn't useful for my use cases, i.e. scientific papers have unusual formatting, it wasn't that difficult to write a wrapper and GUI around the Ivona. Unfortunately, it's not supported anymore and one cannot download the offline version.

Currently, Ivona is owned by the Amazon and its voices are accessible through the Polly AWS service. It's a relatively a cheap service but one still has to have an internet connection and it's not provided with any gui. At least officially.

I've written an application to use AWS Polly. It's a simple graphical interface with some formatting options for the text but it does its job. The AWS Polly GUI is accessible from my GitHub page. It's running on Python3 with PyQt5.

Features are updated as needed so if something might be helpful to anyone, feel free to contact me or create a ticket issue on the repository. I'm using this for my personal work so I'm not planning on leaving this on a side.