Hands-On Chatbot Development with Alexa Skills and Amazon Lex

SSML

When you are sending a response to a user, you may not want Alexa to say it in her normal way. Alexa is already pretty smart and handles punctuation, increasing the tone at the end of a question and pausing after a period, but what if you want to have greater control? 

SSML is a standard markup for speech synthesis, and Alexa supports a subset of SSML, allowing the use of 13 different tags. These tags allow you to specify the way that the text is spoken. This means you can add <break time="2s"> into your speech to add a two-second pause, emphasise a section of the speech using <emphasis level="moderate">text to emphasise</emphasis>, or <prosody rate="slow" pitch="-2st">to change the tone and speed,  </prosody>, of the speech.

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