“I’m so excited to be a part of the Alexa experience.”įollow Follow Adds Unique Samuel L. “It’s on! Shaq is in the house to make your speakers bounce. That said, those looking for a more dynamic voice will likely look toward McCarthy and O’Neal. Starting today, you can have Alexa speak in the voices of Shaquille O’Neal or Melissa McCarthy, replacing Alexa’s default female voice.Owners of Alexa devices can ask Shaq or McCarthy to tell them the weather, play songs, tell jokes, read poems or stories, and more (like asking Shaq to rap or soliciting a funny story. The new voice and wake word options can be chosen by asking the voice assistant to change the two features. Amazon is packing two more celebrities into its Alexa digital assistant. We can’t wait to see what customers think.”Īmazon also added a different new, male voice and a new wake word, Ziggy, for Alexa, unconnected to any celebrity. “We’re thrilled to add two new celebrity personalities to Alexa and had a great time working with Shaquille O’Neal and Melissa McCarthy on this project. Jackson experience on Alexa, and when customers love something, we look for ways to give them more of it,” Alexa Experience vice president Toni Reid said. “Customers have had a lot of fun with the Samuel L. Both new celebrities come out of the gate with one, either Hey Melissa or Hey Shaq. Though Jackson’s voice debuted as an option in December of 2019, it wasn’t until last September that the voice received its own wake word.

To activate the celebrity personalities, users just have to ask Alexa to introduce them to their chosen star and pay $5, the same price as Jackson. I hope you all enjoy all my dad jokes! Fun fact-if you hear a slide whistle, it’s my personal one that I brought with me to the recording studio!” Future Voices It’s been such a fun experience working on this project. “I am so excited to join the Alexa family. “That’s right folks, get ready for the vocal stylings of this nasal midwestern gal!” McCarthy said in a statement. As the intro video above indicates, the personalities of the celebrities flavor how they interact with users. Amazon even built a sound studio at O’Neal’s house for the project, which includes his unique rapping. Amazon’s neural text-to-speech (NTTS) technology then had enough to teach Alexa how to sound like the celebrities. To create the artificial voices took about 60 hours of recording, for up to eight hours at a time. Each has a bunch of pre-recorded dialogue to go with the artificially generated words. The new voices are able to answer questions about the weather, stream music, or tell jokes and stories. O’Neal and McCarthy’s voices handle several tasks for Alexa, but the default voice returns if the request is beyond the scope of the celebrities. Jackson as alternatives to the standard Alexa voice, synthesized using extensive audio recordings, along with a few unique responses to certain questions. The basketball star and actress join Samuel L. Amazon has added Shaquille O’Neal and Melissa McCarthy to the Alexa celebrity cast list, as first reported in Variety.

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