aws.polly is a package for Polly, an Amazon Web Services speech synthesis (computer voice) web service.
To use the package, you will need an AWS account and to enter your credentials into R. Your keypair can be generated on the IAM Management Console under the heading Access Keys. Note that you only have access to your secret key once. After it is generated, you need to save it in a secure location. New keypairs can be generated at any time if yours has been lost, stolen, or forgotten. The aws.iam package profiles tools for working with IAM, including creating roles, users, groups, and credentials programmatically; it is not needed to use IAM credentials.
A detailed description of how credentials can be specified is
provided at: https://github.com/cloudyr/aws.signature/. The easiest way
is to simply set environment variables on the command line prior to
starting R or via an Renviron.site or
.Renviron file, which are used to set environment variables
in R during startup (see ? Startup). They can be also set
within R:
Sys.setenv("AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID" = "mykey",
"AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY" = "mysecretkey",
"AWS_DEFAULT_REGION" = "us-east-1",
"AWS_SESSION_TOKEN" = "mytoken")The basic use of the package is super simple and revolves around the
synthesize() function, which takes a character string and a
voice as input:
library("aws.polly")
# list available voices
list_voices()## Gender Id LanguageCode LanguageName Name
## 1 Female Joanna en-US US English Joanna
## 2 Female Salli en-US US English Salli
## 3 Female Kimberly en-US US English Kimberly
## 4 Female Kendra en-US US English Kendra
## 5 Male Justin en-US US English Justin
## 6 Male Joey en-US US English Joey
## 7 Female Ivy en-US US English Ivy# synthesize some text
vec <- synthesize("Hello world!", voice = "Joanna")The result is a “Wave” object (from the tuneR package), which can be
played using play():
library("tuneR")
play(vec)This might also be handy for setting up an audio error handler:
audio_error <- function() tuneR::play(aws.polly::synthesize(geterrmessage(), voice = "Joanna"))
options(error = audio_error)
stop("Everything went horribly wrong")
options(error = NULL)
This package is not yet on CRAN. To install the latest development version you can install from the cloudyr drat repository:
# latest stable version
install.packages("aws.polly", repos = c(getOption("repos"), "http://cloudyr.github.io/drat"))Or, to pull a potentially unstable version directly from GitHub:
if(!require("ghit")){
install.packages("ghit")
}
ghit::install_github("cloudyr/aws.polly")