Amazon releases service to help brands build custom text-to-speech voices

Voice-assistants like Alexa can be a lot of fun when you can change the voice that they speak in. Like having Samuel L. Jackson telling you exactly how much of a lazy motherf***er you are. Amazon wants to make this even easier though with the release of a new Alexa Service aimed at teaching Alexa how to read the text and say it in a specific voice. The same method they used with Jackson who himself didn’t record every single line he says through Alexa, as they could replicate his vocal likeness through the technology.

Called Amazon Polly (for once a name that actually makes sense), it allows Amazon to offer its neutral network-based TTS technology to create custom voices for a specific brand based on recordings of voices of an actor or actress picked by the brand in partnership with Amazon. This includes Colonel Sanders, with the number of voices likely to grow over time too as more people play with the technology and bring a host of like fictional characters from their favourite moves and games to life.

Impressive technology in how they can replicate the voices of fictional or dead people, though somehow still can’t understand the basics of the different South African accents.

Last Updated: February 5, 2020