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Comment by hackcrafter | Hacker News Reader

This is neat but I've been on the lookout for a service that takes speech and responds with speech that you can use in a domain-specific app.

Basically, Alexa as a service?

Is there something out there that does this?

For certain things that require hands-free usage, this would be a killer feature.

ex. a workout-app that tells you your next rep and weight, and you can respond with what weight/reps you did to add to your log!

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You can add an Amazon Lex bot into a mobile app (Swift, ObjC, Android) using AWS Mobile Hub (https://console.aws.amazon.com/mobilehub/) with a couple of clicks. The apps demonstrate text-to-text and speech-to-speech interaction.

(disclosure: I work for AWS and my team built the Mobile Hub - Lex integration)

Pairing Lex with Polly should get you there.

https://aws.amazon.com/polly/

Cool, thanks!

There is some case study at the bottom of the Lex[0] page that had a disconnected "Polly" thing that I didn't' quite get, but that makes sense.

And it looks like Lex takes voice as input, although I don't know if you can put your app into a "always listening for trigger word" mode for truly hands-free operation or not. Will have to play with it.

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/lex/

I wish they had a demo of Poly on the site. It's pretty bad to have page after page of text about a voice synthesis service and not have "Click here for demo" above the fold in the first page.

I too, am very interested in a domain specific application of lex+domain knowledge+Poly

    > It's pretty bad to have page after page of text about a
    > voice synthesis service and not have "Click here for
    > demo" above the fold in the first page.

There's a table of demo clips in male/female voices for a few languages at the bottom of the first page.

You could pair https://developer.amazon.com/alexa-voice-service with https://developer.amazon.com/alexa-skills-kit

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