Ability to control voice playback speed

[jmernin]

A few people have commented on recent demos (that I've shared) saying that the voice we've used speaks too quickly. Personally, the voice in question (Joanna) is probably the clearest one I've heard but I'll admit that it could indeed be a little slower when talking.

It would be good if Amazon Polly allowed you to control the pitch (or speed) of the voice.

[jmernin]

It looks like you can actually control the speed of the speech is you express your text in SSML format, via the tag, which is detailed here.

• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/polly/latest/dg/voice-speed-vip.html

I tried this out on the Amazon Polly web page and it seems to work well, so perhaps this could be incorporated as a feature of AVG through a new environment variable that's a %age value?

[jmernin]

Practically speaking, I would hope/expect that we could add a new environment variable (AVG_VOICE_SPEED) to default.env, where the value would be a percentage that is used with the tag from the page above.