Chinese tone support

Question

I'm trying out the Mandarin Chinese voice of Polly, but can't seem to find a way to tell it which Chinese tones to use. There are several words in Chinese that can be pronounced in multiple ways (i.e. 当天 → dàng tiān/dāng tiān), so it would be convenient if Polly could support pinyin input and not just hanzi.  
  
I tried using SSML and IPA tone letters, but they seem to be ignored by Polly. As it is now, Polly will sometimes use the wrong tones and I haven't been able to find a workaround.  
  
If there is some workaround for this, or plans for supporting tone information, please let me know.

chiaoting-aws · Accepted Answer

Hi PeterS,  
  
The Chinese voice Zhiyu supports Pinyin in SSML tags. Please use _x-amazon-pinyin_ for the alphabet field and use number 0 to 4 for tones. For your example:

当天  
当天

Thank you for reaching out to us!

PeterS · Answer

Ah, perfect, that changes everything. Thank you!  
  
Btw, I can't seem to find this anywhere in the documentation. It might be worth adding to the documentation in case there are others looking for this feature as well.

Chinese tone support

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