Blog to Podcast, via AWS Polly cloud service

to skip "Alexa, read me this blog post"

Amazon launches a Polly WordPress plugin that turns blog posts into audio, including podcasts - AWS in the News

Amazon Polly for WordPress — WordPress Plugins

"Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech. With dozens of voices across a variety of languages, you can select the ideal voice and build engaging speech-enabled applications that work in many different countries. The Amazon Polly plugin for WordPress is a sample application that shows how WordPress creators can easily add Text-to-Speech capabilities to written content with Amazon Polly. You can generate an audio feed for text-based content and insert it into an embedded player to increase the accessibility of your WordPress site. The sample code also enables you to publish podcasts directly from your site and make them available for listeners in the form of podcasts."

Amazon launches a Polly WordPress plugin that turns blog posts into audio, including podcasts | TechCrunch


Amazon Polly Pricing

"The Amazon Polly free tier includes 5 million characters per month for speech or Speech Marks requests, for the first 12 months, starting from your first request for speech.
$4.00 per 1 million characters for speech (~23 hours, 8 min)
Microsoft Azure "Cognitive Service" / Bing has a similar service / API, at least it used to have it.
Speech-to-text is still there. Current list of service does not include text-to-speech.
Similar API is available in Windows, but with smaller number of "Agent" voices.

Text to Speech API of Microsoft Speech Service | Microsoft Docs

Cognitive Service Try experience | Microsoft Azure


GCP also includes only speech-to-text, , no text-to-speech, only provides "reader" Android app.

Cloud Natural Language  |  Google Cloud Platform



Related, Amazon also started offering translation service with limited set of languages, but extensible

Amazon Translate – Neural Machine Translation - AWS

A quick look at Machine Translation with Amazon Translate