Ivy TTS: the Amazon Polly child voice and alternatives
Ivy is one of the most recognizable synthetic child voices: a young girl’s voice in US English that turns up in animations, memes and school projects. It comes from Amazon Polly, Amazon’s text to speech service, where it is listed as a female child voice in standard and neural versions. Polly also has two boy voices, Justin and Kevin.
This guide explains where Ivy comes from, how to use it, and which child and teen voices SuperClonica offers for your own projects.
Where Ivy comes from
Amazon Polly lists Ivy under US English as a female child voice, available with the standard and neural engines; Justin and Kevin are male child voices in neural form. You use them through Polly itself or through tools built on it, billed per character; see Amazon’s pricing page for current rates.
Using Ivy
In Polly you pick Ivy as the voice for a request, in the console or the API, and get an audio file back. Many animation and video tools that offered Polly voices included her, which is why the voice is so familiar online.
Child and teen voices in SuperClonica
SuperClonica does not copy Ivy; that voice belongs to Amazon. The catalog has its own child and teen voices, from a little boy and a schoolgirl to a teenager, made by voice authors for Supertonic 3. Every voice page plays a line of 30 to 100 characters free, and our guide to child voices shows how to write lines that sound young.
Offline and in 31 languages
Install the free engine with python -m pip install superclonica-cpu and voice a script offline: superclonica --text-file lines.txt --voice kid.json --lang en --output lines.mp3. Every voice speaks all 31 languages of Supertonic 3, so a child character can speak Spanish or Japanese too. Chinese is not supported yet.