Introducing Amazon Polly Bidirectional Streaming: Real-time speech synthesis for conversational AI

This article announces Amazon Polly's new Bidirectional Streaming API for real-time text-to-speech synthesis in conversational AI applications.

• Send text incrementally and receive synthesized audio simultaneously over single connection
• Eliminates traditional bottleneck of waiting for complete text before synthesis begins
• 39% faster processing time compared to traditional SynthesizeSpeech API in benchmarks
• Reduces API calls from 27 to 1 for same workload
• Supports Java, JavaScript, .NET, C++, Go, Kotlin, PHP, Ruby, Rust, Swift SDKs
• Ideal for LLM-powered assistants, real-time translation, IVR systems, accessibility tools
• Simplifies architecture by eliminating need for custom chunking logic and middleware

The bidirectional streaming API enables faster, more natural conversational experiences by allowing audio playback to begin while text generation continues, reducing perceived latency and infrastructure complexity.