Alexa, do you know where I could go to get myself a tasty burger?
Alexa, where is my super suit?
Alexa, you been taking them dick pills again?
In 2017, the GPS app, Waze, announced that a Mr. T "voice pack" would soon be available to tell all the fools of the world how to get to their desired destination. It was quite the time to be alive as well as a licensed driver of a motor vehicle. Now, a "voice pack" that some may consider to be even more epic than the B.A. Baracus actor's foray into global positioning has been announced, for Amazon's Alexa program.
Ladies and gentlemen, I do hope you're sitting down, because Samuel L. Jackson has inked a deal with Amazon to provide his melodious tones as a voice option for Alexa, the company's cloud-based digital assistant. Plans are to release the pack later this year, with more celebrity voice packs to follow in 2020. Oh, and before you ask, yes, the Jackson-based pack will be available in both clean and explicit formats.
Making it all possible is Amazon's Neural Text-to-Speech technology, a program designed to make robotic voices sound more "human." It also allows for Alexa to replicate specific speech-patterns of existing voices, mimicking inflections, pronunciations and all the minor details that makes each person's voice unique among others. In other words, Alexa will be doing her best Samuel L. Jackson impression for the pack, rather than spewing a series or pre-recorded phrases. Additional plans see Amazon also introducing a multilingual mode for Alexa, which of course will serve in expanding the service's reach for bilingual speakers and households.
Are you ready to have Samuel L. Jackson help plan your week's itinerary? Let us know in the comments section below.
