amazon-polly

Hasn’t been updated in over a year and appears to have stopped working. Issues with CDN, Pollycast, transcribe and translate. It served well for a few years but now seems to be at End of Life. Probably time to write my own.

n?o funciona!

It used to work fine on older WordPress versions. Well, at least CDN or should I say Site Acceleration doesn’t work anymore. I’m unable to create new Cloudfront distribution with the plugin. Whenever I try to create new Cloudfront distribution I end up with: `Caught exception in method AmazonAI_Cloudformation::check_cf_creation in class AmazonAI_Cloudformation: CloudFormation stack is in an unexpected state. CloudFront distribution state is and stack state is UPDATE_ROLLBACK_COMPLETE ` The only thing I can say, it’s trash. Full of bugs.

1) Changing individual voices (per post) reverts back to the very first voice selected. IE: If you select “UK Brian”, then wish to change to “US Matthew”, it’ll reset to UK Brian. 2) Doesn’t show any audio on some posts. Even if select voice (this time voice stays), but no audio generated, even with S3 turned on. MAIN CONCERN IS #1 above. One should be able to change voice PER POST, but it simply resets to the first voice.

The neural voices are very cool. And a free million characters per month for a year is great. Altogether, quite affordable, even once trial expires. App is a bit buggy tho. I was running it and got a “fatal error” e-mail and was told to contact my host. As it turns out, everything seemed fine. No issues during or after. Still alarming. Also, app was a buggy at times where it would mess up the text-to-voice after updating a post (make it shorter or longer or not start at the beginning). It worked by unchecking it, saving, then rechecking it, but then I’m sure that went against my character count.. Weird. The bulk edit also doesn’t work (they turned it off evidently). That’s probably better given the occasional bugginess (don’t want to rack up a big bill). But that would have saved me a lot of time.. It reads the alt text of images.. I didn’t like that and not sure how to turn it off. In addition, there is no option to keep it from regenerating a complete audio file after every little edit. Sometimes, we want to change grammar here and there, or make a small revision, without paying for a completely new page. There should be the option to disable “updates on scheduling.” Lastly, on mobile, there should be the option to playback faster. This option only shows on Desktop. Most we traffic is mobile, and people value being able to speed playback. Overall, pretty awesome technology. App far from perfect, though.

Typical Amazon cleverness, let down by their inability to communicate. Turning on plugin causes fatal errors, no clue as to how to fix or any documentation on exact php modules or setup required. I tried for a couple of hours and gave up. PHP Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined method GuzzleHttp\Promise\Coroutine::of() in /var/www/html/wp-content/plugins/amazon-polly/vendor/guzzlehttp/promises/src/functions.php:362