Parameters for TTS_POLLY Call Feature

These are the parameters that are required for TTS using Amazon Polly

Table 1. Parameters for TTS_POLLY Call Feature
Name Description
Name Name of the call feature
Type TTS_POLLY
access_key The access key for a user on the AWS account that has permissions to use Polly
secret_key The secret key for a user on the AWS account that has permissions to use Polly
region The region that the user with Polly permissions belongs to (e.g. eu-west-1)
locale The locale that this Call Feature will be used for. This is used to determine which TTS resource is used when a voice application attempts to do TTS. For further details on how locale works for call features, please refer to BAM Command Line Utility Call Features Panel.
voice_id The name of the voice to use. Please refer to the AWS Polly documentation for a list of available voices.
Description Description of the call feature
Weight A value determining how often to use the Call Feature, when multiple features of the same functionality, locale and priority are present. The higher the weight in relation to weights of these other features, the more often this feature will be used. For more information on how BVR uses Weight and Priority to provide load balancing and redundancy, please refer to Weight and Priority usage in the Blueworx Platform
Priority Features with a lower priority value will be used before features with a higher priority value. Only if all relevant Call Features of a lower priority are DOWN will a higher priority number Call Feature be used. It is recommended to use bigger numbers when setting up priorities (i.e. 10, 20, 30 instead of 1, 2, 3) to allow for inserting Call Features inbetween existing priority levels. For more information on how BVR uses Weight and Priority to provide load balancing and redundancy, please refer to Weight and Priority usage in the Blueworx Platform
Down Retry Interval The amount of time before trying to use a Call Feature again once it has been determined to be DOWN. BVR will attempt to use it again sooner if no alternative options exist for the task on the application.

Limitations when using Amazon Polly

At the time of writing, Amazon Polly supports 80 transactions per second per account. It is possible that this will be exceeded. If that happens, AWS will reject BVR's request to synthesise speech, which will appear in the error logs as "Rate Exceeded" and an error code of "ThrottlingException".

As an example:

2019/04/23 12:50:09.089 VC091431EA000008BE AMZ_TTS_PO [pool-2235-thread-3 - 7362] [T003595] WARNING Amazon Polly request failed:
com.amazonaws.services.polly.model.AmazonPollyException: Rate exceeded (Service: AmazonPolly; Status Code: 400; Error Code: ThrottlingException; Request ID: xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx)

Note that exceeding the limit will result in the TTS session terminating.