Polly is priced at $4 per million characters and the Google WaveNet voices are $16 (compared with the Google non-WaveNet voices, which are also $4).
After listening to a few samples from each service, the voice quality and prosody modeling seem roughly on par between Polly and WaveNet, or at least the differences I heard didn't seem to justify a 4x price multiplier.
But I'd love to hear an informed opinion from someone with more expertise...
A lot of voice generation is cost-center (call center that are outsourced to cheapest location) with short sentences. I doubt industry would pay 4x price multiplier for that use-case.
So in fact WaveNet competes more with voiceover and new use-cases such as voice assistants. Still I don't hear that much difference there today, but maybe WaveNet will improve in the future to human level sooner than the other models.
https://aws.amazon.com/polly/
Polly is priced at $4 per million characters and the Google WaveNet voices are $16 (compared with the Google non-WaveNet voices, which are also $4).
After listening to a few samples from each service, the voice quality and prosody modeling seem roughly on par between Polly and WaveNet, or at least the differences I heard didn't seem to justify a 4x price multiplier.
But I'd love to hear an informed opinion from someone with more expertise...