Amazon Polly Voices in Pilot2ATC

[James Romanoski 1]

I've also been facing the same issues with Polly in Pilot2ATC for a few years now. Just started using P2ATC more again with MSFS and finding it frustrating with the multiple restarts. If there is a simpler way to force the SAPI calls to work without a full P2ATC restart, then please let me know here.

I researched to see if Amazon had done any changes to address the issue. I found that NicolasConstant had already tried to write a sample .NET  application which exhibits the same issues: https://github.com/awslabs/amazon-polly-tts-for-windows/issues/16

Unfortunately, I don't see any PRs (code updates) on the Amazon Polly TTS Engine for Windows code base that would address the issue. In fact, I don't see any active work being done on this project based on the logs. So we may be out of luck.

I'm currently primarily writing in C# these days. So my C++ code is very rusty. However, I may pull down the code and see if I can't narrow down where the issue is happening. If anyone else has already gone down that path, please message back here.

[Burge 28]

So amazon polley not worth the hassle 

[molleh 451]

On 10/24/2022 at 3:24 AM, Burge said:

So amazon polley not worth the hassle 

No, it's not worth the hassle. I'd just use the free Microsoft voices unless you want to spend a large sum of money on Cereproc voices.

[the_simpilot 81]

Anyone had tried Amazon Polly with Win11? I followed all the steps here but still can't see the polly voices in Windows control panel. Not sure if I'm doing something wrong or the plugin is not compatible with win 11

Edited November 14, 2022 by the_simpilot

[RobJC 2,069]

On 11/14/2022 at 11:22 AM, the_simpilot said:

Anyone had tried Amazon Polly with Win11? I followed all the steps here but still can't see the polly voices in Windows control panel. Not sure if I'm doing something wrong or the plugin is not compatible with win 11

Same issue here. I can see the voices in P2A but not in the control panel in Win 11

[TapiCZ 2]

I am Windows 11 22H2 user: 

Polly voices successfully installed and they always work via PollyPlayer. But with P2A it is a lottery. Sometimes it works like a charm, sometimes it do not work even after multiple P2A restarts... Very frustrating

 

Edited February 5, 2023 by TapiCZ

[jlohrenz 133]

So I had the same issue and finally figured it out.  When you log into your AWS account pay attention to the upper right corner and it'll tell your region is.  If when going through the guide to get polly setup on your PC you used a different region during the configuration than what AWS says you are in you will run into the situation where Polly Voices works, but the voices don't work anywhere else.

For me, I live in Minnesota, and for most things I've always selected 'west' based servers.  When I logged into AWS it said Ohio, or us-east-1.  Once I re-did the configuration and put in the correct region things have been working since.  I did find that they restrict what voices work with the regions, so when selecting voices don't be surprised if you get some errors popping up until you find ones that work in your region.

[Room112 27]

On 3/29/2023 at 10:47 AM, jlohrenz said:

So I had the same issue and finally figured it out.  When you log into your AWS account pay attention to the upper right corner and it'll tell your region is.  If when going through the guide to get polly setup on your PC you used a different region during the configuration than what AWS says you are in you will run into the situation where Polly Voices works, but the voices don't work anywhere else.

For me, I live in Minnesota, and for most things I've always selected 'west' based servers.  When I logged into AWS it said Ohio, or us-east-1.  Once I re-did the configuration and put in the correct region things have been working since.  I did find that they restrict what voices work with the regions, so when selecting voices don't be surprised if you get some errors popping up until you find ones that work in your region.

So have you been able to get Polly to work consistently in P2A without multiple restarts?

[jlohrenz 133]

So far.  Only had time for a few short flights but previous to this I could rarely get any voices to work at all outside of their voice testing app.

[Sims Smith 302]

On 2/9/2022 at 4:27 AM, ang58 said:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/polly/latest/dg/install-voice-plugin2.html

Is Polly player for Windows still available?  I can't find the .zip file and this link above is also gone. 

Edited January 1 by Sims Smith

[imoore 1]

7 hours ago, Sims Smith said:

Is Polly player for Windows still available?  I can't find the .zip file and this link above is also gone. 

I just spend a while looking for it too. I was able to find a working link here: https://web.archive.org/web/20221119162529/https://docs.aws.amazon.com/polly/latest/dg/install-voice-plugin2.html

The instructions and link to the plugin still worked for me from that link.

[Room112 27]

On 1/1/2024 at 7:03 PM, imoore said:

I just spend a while looking for it too. I was able to find a working link here: https://web.archive.org/web/20221119162529/https://docs.aws.amazon.com/polly/latest/dg/install-voice-plugin2.html

The instructions and link to the plugin still worked for me from that link.

The link worked for me and I'm able to get Polly working for me consistently. Some tips I've seen floating around that worked for me:

- Set the correct region when registering Polly in Windows. 

- Assign a voice to each controller, don't use the randomize feature.

[goaliejerry 0]

On 1/17/2024 at 1:03 AM, Room112 said:

The link worked for me and I'm able to get Polly working for me consistently. Some tips I've seen floating around that worked for me:

- Set the correct region when registering Polly in Windows. 

- Assign a voice to each controller, don't use the randomize feature.

God thank you, I upgraded to Windows 11 from 10 and I could not for the life of me figure out why this was so hard to re-setup when I had it before without so much effort.  I learned Amazon stopped supporting Polly in SAPI (hence your waybackmachine link) (I'm no programmer so I have no idea SAPI t means) and I didn't remember it being so difficult to figure out even as a non-programmer.  I have an AWS account, I see Polly setup in the console and can even type tests and whatnot to hear some voices, but I couldn't figure out that last step to take that and put the voices so they show up as options in Windows text-to-speech settings, I could not figure out how to get the voices to show up.

I still can't.  I used your link, downloaded the plugin, but I get nothing.  Any tips?  Good guide?  Am I missing something?  Otherwise I think Polly in Pilot2ATC is dead.  Shame.  

[Winsimpilot 0]

On 2/1/2024 at 6:50 PM, goaliejerry said:

God thank you, I upgraded to Windows 11 from 10 and I could not for the life of me figure out why this was so hard to re-setup when I had it before without so much effort.  I learned Amazon stopped supporting Polly in SAPI (hence your waybackmachine link) (I'm no programmer so I have no idea SAPI t means) and I didn't remember it being so difficult to figure out even as a non-programmer.  I have an AWS account, I see Polly setup in the console and can even type tests and whatnot to hear some voices, but I couldn't figure out that last step to take that and put the voices so they show up as options in Windows text-to-speech settings, I could not figure out how to get the voices to show up.

I still can't.  I used your link, downloaded the plugin, but I get nothing.  Any tips?  Good guide?  Am I missing something?  Otherwise I think Polly in Pilot2ATC is dead.  Shame.  

Hey Man,

I got the same issue but I figured it out. Let me know if it still needed. Thx.