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.

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!

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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