The Amazon Polly Sample

This sample demonstrates use of the Amazon Polly APIs to retrieve list of voices and generate speech using the given voice. It uses Cognito authentication in conjunction with Amazon Polly in order to authenticate to the Amazon Polly service. The user is presented with a list of voices which is retrieved when the application loads.

Requirements

• Xcode 9.2 and later
• iOS 8 and later

Using the Sample

1. The AWS Mobile SDK for iOS is available through CocoaPods. If you have not installed CocoaPods, install CocoaPods:

    sudo gem install cocoapods
    pod setup
   

2. To install the AWS Mobile SDK for iOS, change the current directory to the one with your Podfile in it and run the following command:

    pod install
   

3. This sample requires Cognito to authorize to Amazon Polly. Use Amazon Cognito to create a new identity pool:

   1. In the Amazon Cognito Console, press the Manage Federated Identities button and on the resulting page press the Create new identity pool button.

   2. Give your identity pool a name and ensure that Enable access to unauthenticated identities under the Unauthenticated identities section is checked. This allows the sample application to assume the unauthenticated role associated with this identity pool. Press the Create Pool button to create your identity pool.

      Important: see note below on unauthenticated user access.

   3. As part of creating the identity pool, Cognito will setup two roles in Identity and Access Management (IAM). These will be named something similar to: Cognito_PoolNameAuth_Role and Cognito_PoolNameUnauth_Role. You can view them by pressing the View Details button. Now press the Allow button to create the roles.

   4. Save the Identity pool ID value that shows up in red in the "Getting started with Amazon Cognito" page, it should look similar to: `us-east-1:xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx" and note the region that is being used. These will be used in the application code later.

   5. Now we will attach a policy to the unauthenticated role which has permissions to access the required Amazon Polly API. This is done by attaching an IAM Policy to the unauthenticated role in the IAM Console. First, search for the unauth role that you created in step 3 above (named something similar to Cognito_PoolNameUnauth_Role) and select its hyperlink. In the resulting "Summary" page press the Attach Policy button in the "Permissions" tab.

   6. Search for "polly" and check the box next to the policy named AmazonPollyFullAccess and then press the Attach Policy button. This policy allows the application to perform all operations on the Amazon Polly service.

      More information on AWS IAM roles and policies can be found here. More information on Amazon Polly policies can be found here.

      Note: To keep this example simple it makes use of unauthenticated users in the identity pool. This can be used for getting started and prototypes but unauthenticated users should typically only be given read-only permissions in production applications. More information on Cognito identity pools including the Cognito developer guide can be found here.

4. Open PollySample.xcworkspace.

5. Open awsconfiguration.json and update the values for Cognito Identity Pool ID (from the value you saved above) and the region value for CognitoIdentity, Polly and PollySynthesizeSpeechUrlBuilder (for example us-east-1).

   "CredentialsProvider": {
       "CognitoIdentity": {
           "Default": {
               "PoolId": "CHANGE_ME",
               "Region": "CHANGE_ME"
           }
       }
   },
   "Polly": {
       "Default": {
           "Region": "CHANGE_ME"
       }
   },
   "PollySynthesizeSpeechUrlBuilder": {
       "Default": {
           "Region": "CHANGE_ME"
       }
   }

6. Build and run the sample app.

The app will automatically query Amazon Polly for the list of voices and synthesize text with the selected voice.