Amazon Alexa News & Updates

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[Sushubh]

From the very beginning of Alexa, customers have enthralled with Alexa's personality.

Whether it's jokes, her opinions or original songs, the core of her personality is her name and her voice.

When we introduced Alexa, we used state-of-the art text to speech technology. Now, we're working to make Alexa's personalities - and customer interactions more natural.

Another benefit we've discovered moving to neural test to speech has been it gives us more freedom to invent for our customers. For example, the same TTS technology and back-end work on natural language processing also allows us to add new types of lanaguges very quickly.

With billions of people in the world speaking more than one language, many homes are not homogenous when it comes to languages anymore.

So for those customers, we’re rolling out Multilingual Mode. This will be available in three pairs to start: in the United States - English and Spanish, in India - Indian English and Hindi, and in Canada - Canadian English and French.

U.S. Spanish and Multilingual Mode will be available starting next month and we will continue to build.

We can also use this neural text to speech technology to make Alexa more emotive and expressive. She can sound more excited, like when your favorite team wins the game. Or, she can mimic other types of expressions. So, if she’s reading the news, she has a newscaster voice that sounds like the cadence of how you read the news.

While customers love Alexa's voice, they sometimes want to hear a completely different voice. Customers loved getting morning greetings from Chelsea Handler, and a duet with Ed Sheeran.

In the past, we had to script and record all of these interactions, but with neural text to speech, we're able to model a celebrity voice directly.

We’re announcing the first celebrity voice for Alexa, brought to life using Neural TTS.

Iconic actor and producer Samuel L. Jackson is the first celebrity voice for Alexa. He can tell you jokes, let you know if it’s raining, set timers and alarms, play music and more – all with a bit of his own personality. Two versions of his voice - explicit and non-explicit. Amazon.com/asksam

You’ll be able to interact with Samuel L. Jackson later this year - and if you add this personality in 2019, you'll get a special price of $0.99. Stay tuned for more celebrity voices next year.

 

[Sushubh]

We’re excited for more customers to experience the magic of eero’s super simple WiFi and we want to make this experience even simpler through Alexa. So we taught Alexa about managing WiFi access.

Instead of unlocking your phone and using an app, or using a dedicated skill, you can now say:
“Alexa, pause the WiFi for dinner,”
“Alexa, turn on the guest WiFi,”
“Alexa, pause the Playstation WiFi.”

We didn’t want to limit this feature to eero, so Alexa customers can use their voice to manage Wi-Fi access on compatible Asus, and TP-Link routers this fall, and devices from Arris and Linksys starting early next year.

 

[Sushubh]

Today we’re excited to announce a General Motors Alexa integration.

GM is the first automaker to deliver a fully embedded Alexa experience based on the Alexa Auto SDK, and the breadth: Alexa will be available on millions of vehicles across all four GM brands – Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet and GMC. The best part is that this isn’t just about brand new vehicles. It’ll also be available to millions of existing vehicles on the road with a simple over-the-air update.

 

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[Sushubh]

New ways Alexa makes life simpler and more convenient

 

[Sushubh]

Here’s How Amazon Alexa Will Recognize When You’re Frustrated

 

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