Samuel L. Jackson will become the first celebrity voice option for Alexa, Amazon’s cloud-based digital assistant.
Amazon will add more celebrity guest voices to the platform in 2020, Variety reports. Alexa’s Jackson “voice pack” will be available later this year for a special 99 cent intro price, in both clean and explicit versions.
Amazon was able to include Jackon’s voice due to a new Neural Text-to-Speech technology the company developed. This will make Alexa’s voice sound more human, with better emotive and expressive speech. The technology will also allow Alexa to replicate speech inflections of actual people, as well.
To install the Jackson voice pack, users can say, “Alexa, introduce me to Samuel L. Jackson,” and decide whether they want him to use explicit or censored language. Alexa has featured celebrity voices before, like morning greetings from Chelsea Handler or a duet with Ed Sheeran, though they necessitated pre-recorded audio.
Amazon also introduced other features for Alexa, including a multilingual mode for bilingual speakers. In the U.S., it will support English and Spanish, while in Canada, customers can choose English and French. In India, users will be able to select English and Hindi.
The company also recently launched the new fidelity-focused music streaming service Amazon Music HD, which promises, “high-quality streaming to the masses.”
