Have you ever wanted to yell: I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger ?
Amazon‘s ‘personal assistant’ Alexa undeniably revolutionised the home-tech market. But one of the few complaints about Alexa’s growing capabilities is that the audio-instruction devices still have limited accents and you can only instruct the speakers (and compatible equipment) with names such as ‘Alexa, Computer and Echo‘. There are new skills being added every day and it’s safe to predict that one of the most successful ones could well turn out to be an option that Amazon announced earlier this year and which arrived this week…
And that is for Samuel L. Jackson’s voice to be set as a default option for a whole range of commands.
Amazon confirms that the skill has an introductory price of .99c with a regular price of $4.99 – and will only currently be available for those with the language set to English (US). After downloading the skill to your system you’ll be able to issue commands such as “Alexa, ask Samuel L. Jackson for the weather.” (the possible answer: Ooooh, Mother Nature is angry!!!). At this stage here will not be an option for Mr Jackson to replace your version of Alexa/Echo entirely. It seems the initial idea came from the Super Bowl ad earlier this year in which he and several other celebrities (including Gordon Ramsay, Rebel Wilson, Cardi B and Anthony Hopkins) pretended to be the new ‘voice’ to hilarious effect.
The new skill will have two versions, an expletive-enabled edition and a ‘clean’ edition. With developments in neural text-to-speech technology, it might be sooner rather than later when Alexa is given a whole range of new ****** options to make ‘her’ less ****** generic.
You can find out more here…
