Well, this was kind of unexpected but a welcome one regardless. It's been announced that none other than Samuel L. Jackson will be a new voice for Alexa. That's right, now you can ask Sam to play your favorite station, Cities97.1 on iHeart Radio or ask him to order something on Amazon. Samuel L Jackson will be the first celebrity to take this on and the feature will be available for everyone later this year for a fee. No word on what the cost will be quite yet though.
According to The Guardian, The Jackson feature will allow users of Alexa-enabled devices to interact with an AI version of the actor developed using the company’s neural text-to-speech technology. Jackson is not the first celebrity to feature on Alexa, but previous celebrity voice features have relied upon pre-recorded audio. The Alexa feature promises to make liberal use of Jackson’s reputation for colorful language, but users will have the capacity to turn swearing on and off.
Amazon announced that more celebrity voices will become available in 2020. As for now, I'm totally cool with having Sam as the voice of my Alexa. The feature was one of a number of updates to Alexa announced at Amazon’s annual hardware exhibition in Seattle on Wednesday. Other updates included new privacy options such as auto-deletion of voice recordings, and new commands that force the program to reveal the data it has collected.
What do you think of this upcoming feature? Will you be getting it?