How to Connect Amazon Polly with Highrise (2026)

Why Connect Amazon Polly with Highrise

Amazon Polly is a cloud-based text-to-speech (TTS) service from AWS that converts text into lifelike speech using deep learning. It supports dozens of languages and multiple voice options, making it useful for accessibility features, voice notifications, audio content creation, and automated phone systems. Highrise is a simple CRM (customer relationship management) tool, originally developed by Basecamp, designed for tracking contacts, conversations, deals, and tasks for small businesses. Connecting Amazon Polly with Highrise enables businesses to add voice capabilities to their customer relationship workflows, such as audio summaries of contact notes, voice-based notifications about deal updates, and spoken reminders for follow-up tasks.

This integration is particularly useful for teams that are on the move and prefer consuming CRM updates through audio rather than reading through text-based records.

What This Integration Does

An Amazon Polly-Highrise integration enables:

• Convert Highrise contact notes, deal summaries, and task descriptions into audio files using Amazon Polly's natural-sounding voices.
• Generate audio briefings of daily Highrise tasks and upcoming follow-ups that team members can listen to during their commute or while multitasking.
• Create voice notifications for critical CRM events, such as when a deal moves to a new stage or a high-priority contact requires attention.
• Build audio archives of customer interaction histories stored in Highrise for easy review without screen time.

Native vs Third-Party Integration

Amazon Polly and Highrise do not have a native integration. Amazon Polly is an AWS service accessed through the AWS SDK or REST API, while Highrise offers its own REST API for accessing CRM data. To connect them, you will need a third-party automation tool or custom code.

Zapier can connect to Highrise as a trigger app (detecting new contacts, notes, tasks, or deals) and can call Amazon Polly through an AWS Lambda function or HTTP webhook. Make supports both Highrise and AWS modules, providing a more direct path to calling Amazon Polly's API. n8n offers AWS and HTTP nodes that work well for this type of integration.

Note that Highrise has been in maintenance mode for some time, meaning it still works but is no longer receiving new features. If you are considering this integration for a new project, evaluate whether Highrise meets your long-term CRM needs.

Step-by-Step Setup

Step 1: Configure AWS and Amazon Polly

Log into the AWS Management Console and navigate to the Amazon Polly service. Familiarize yourself with the available voices and languages. Create an IAM user with permissions to call the Polly API (the AmazonPollyFullAccess policy). Generate access keys (Access Key ID and Secret Access Key) for the IAM user. Note the AWS region you want to use for Polly requests.

Step 2: Set Up Highrise API Access

In Highrise, obtain your API authentication token. Highrise uses HTTP Basic Authentication with your API token as the username and "X" as the password. Your Highrise API base URL follows the format: https://yourcompany.highrisehq.com. Familiarize yourself with the API endpoints for contacts, notes, tasks, and deals.

Step 3: Create the Automation Workflow

Using Make or n8n, create a workflow that triggers on a schedule (daily for briefings) or on specific Highrise events. The workflow should pull relevant data from Highrise, format it into a readable text script, send the text to Amazon Polly's SynthesizeSpeech API, and store or deliver the resulting audio file.

Step 4: Format Text for Speech

Before sending text to Amazon Polly, format it for natural-sounding speech. Use SSML (Speech Synthesis Markup Language) to add pauses between sections, emphasize important words, and control pronunciation. For example, insert a pause after each contact name and before reading their associated notes. Remove any HTML tags, special characters, or formatting codes from Highrise data before sending to Polly.

Step 5: Deliver the Audio

Store the generated audio files in Amazon S3 and share them through a secure link, or send them directly to team members via email, Slack, or a mobile app. For daily briefings, create an automated email that includes a link to the morning's audio summary of Highrise tasks and follow-ups.

Common Use Cases

• Morning CRM briefings: Generate a daily audio summary of upcoming tasks, follow-ups, and deal updates from Highrise for sales team members to listen to while commuting.
• Contact note narration: Before a meeting with a client, generate an audio playback of all notes and interactions stored in Highrise for that contact.
• Accessibility: For team members with visual impairments or reading difficulties, provide audio versions of Highrise CRM data to ensure equal access to customer information.
• Voice notifications: Send audio alerts through a voice notification system when high-value deals in Highrise change status or when overdue tasks need attention.
• Customer outreach scripts: Use Amazon Polly to read back call scripts stored in Highrise notes, helping sales reps practice their delivery before customer conversations.

Tips and Best Practices

• Choose the right Polly voice: Amazon Polly offers standard and neural voices. Neural voices sound more natural but cost more. Use neural voices for customer-facing audio and standard voices for internal briefings.
• Use SSML for better output: Wrap your text in SSML tags to improve the quality of speech output. Add breaks between paragraphs, spell out abbreviations, and use prosody tags to control speed and volume.
• Keep audio segments short: Rather than generating one long audio file for all daily CRM updates, create separate segments for each contact or deal. This makes it easier to skip to relevant sections.
• Monitor AWS costs: Amazon Polly charges per character synthesized. Track your usage to avoid unexpected costs, especially if you are converting large volumes of Highrise data to audio.
• Sanitize CRM data: Highrise notes may contain informal text, abbreviations, or formatting that sounds awkward when spoken. Add a text preprocessing step that cleans up the data before sending it to Polly.
• Plan for Highrise's future: Since Highrise is in maintenance mode, consider whether migrating to a more actively developed CRM might be necessary. If you do migrate, the Amazon Polly component of this integration can be adapted to work with any CRM that has an API.