Amazon Ends Paid Option for Customized Celebrity Voices on Alexa

Amazon did not state the reasons for this, but it is clearly the consequences of a commercial failure. Its virtual assistant Alexa will no longer speak with the voices of actor Samuel L. Jackson, basketball player Shaquille O’Neal and actress Melissa McCarthy, the three celebrities who were offered for this paid customization option.

Samuel L. Jackson’s voice was first introduced and could tell users jokes and stories or answer questions. The Amazon page for the voice actor from the film “Pulp Fiction” states, “Customers who previously purchased the experience can continue to use the skill through April 2023,” with a grace period granted until April 2023. as of June 7, according to an Amazon spokesperson interrogates by the Techcrunch website.

Inducted in 2019, the celebrity voices use Amazon’s neural text-to-speech model, which uses machine learning instead of relying on canned responses, the model generates voices with fun personalities.

Amazon’s announcement comes a year after it introduced a controversial Alexa feature that lets it imitate all voices from a short snippet. Meanwhile, generative artificial intelligence has taken a leap forward, manifested in particular by Open AI’s ChatGPT conversational tool and several services for easily cloning voices.

The firm founded by Jeff Bezos recently put an end to rumors that it was abandoning the development of Alexa after massive layoffs at the end of 2022. It reiterated its ambitions by promising to soon offer with Alexa “the best assistant in the world”.