Remember how we learned to use Ivona in a series of tutorials for speech synthesis with Python? If you don't, here's a [refresher](https://steemit.com/programming/@cristi/making-a-voice-synthesis-app-with-ivona-and-python-part-6).

Ivona has been deprecated and it will cease to accept API calls at the end of June 2017. The good news is that it's been integrated into Amazon Polly, which kindof goes along the same lines (lifelike speech synthesis). And another good news is that some of the voices we've used with Ivona are available in Polly; but we'll see more on that later. I might have a new preferred female voice (see the video below).

In this first video I'm introducing Polly and we learn how to set up the environment so you can code along. We learn:

- where to go to register an account,
- some thoughts on the free tier and the pricing after the free tier is over, 
- Python packages to install
- how to login/configure the Amazon Web Services command line interface (awscli)
- how to test if the installation has been made correctly
- etc.

So, if you will be joining me in this series or if you just want to know what it's all about, please watch the video below (~7 minutes long). 
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<center><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nxzAb9r-u5A" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></center>
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[Cristi Vlad](http://cristivlad.com), Self-Experimenter and Author