At its annual hardware event on Wednesday, Amazon unveiled a slew of updates to its virtual assistant, Alexa, including the ability to add Samuel Jackson's voice. The news has been making waves online , drawing positive reactions.
Amazon uses text-to-speech technology to reproduce the actor's voice, rather than having to record every possible conversation. This technology sounds pretty creepy, but it certainly makes the process a lot faster.
Samuel L. Jackson's Alexa character will be released later this year. You can get it for just $0.99. There will reportedly be explicit and non-explicit versions of Samuel Jackson as Alexa.
Amazon also announced a “deep learning model” that will allow Alexa to understand vocal aspects. For example, if it senses frustration, it will recognize it, according to the company. The feature will be released next year.
In other news, Alexa is offering some new privacy and ease-of-use options. Starting now, users can ask “Alexa, tell me what you heard” and it will play back your last voice command. Later in 2019, Amazon will add an “Alexa, why did you do that?” command that will force Alexa to explain its most recent response to you.
Since users started to have doubts about how Alexa stores voice commands , Amazon is also adding an auto-delete toggle to the Privacy Hub . The auto-delete tool will automatically purge anything older than three months or 18 months, depending on the user's choice.
