Ok, well that might have been a little bit of a twist on what’s really happening, but Amazon has announced that Alexa now supports the ability to get both excited or even disappointed when speaking.
Normally, Alexa’s voice can seem a bit generic, albeit much better than the text-to-voice bots/engines of the past. Although the quality of the voice, in general, has improved over the years, you can still easily tell the difference between Alexa and a normal human being. This can take away from the overall experience if you were hoping for an intelligent-sounding digital assistant.
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Amazon has announced the support for various levels of excitement or disappointment within Alexa’s speech patterns, which will start popping up shortly. The new ability is being rolled out to developers, giving them access to making use of such.
So you may not see it (or in this case, hear it) immediately, as you do have to wait for developers to jump on board, but this can greatly add to the experience when it comes to more realistic sounding interaction. It will make the day’s weather seem more like a weatherman (or lady) telling you the facts. It will make daily news bits seem more realistic, and it will make games a lot more fun since you’ll be able to hear how disappointed Alexa is in your trivia answer.
In the meantime, you can check out the two below examples to hear the difference between how Alexa has sounded, and how the new emotions can bring color to (her) words. Allowing her to sound just a little more human.
The Old:
The New:
