AP/Elaine Thompson
An Amazon Echo speaker.
- Amazon has developed a new voice for its AI-assistant Alexa which sounds more like a news anchor, The Verge reports.
- It did this by training neural text-to-speech technology on audio recordings of real newsreaders to pick up on their inflections and nuances.
- The result is still a little robotic, but recognisably more like a newsreader than Alexa's standard voice.
Amazon has been working on a new voice for Alexa to make it sound more like a news anchor, which it says customers prefer when listening to the AI-assistant reading out headlines.
The Verge reports that Amazon developed this new voice by combining neural text-to-speech technology (or NTTS) with recording audio clips from real newscasters.
Here's Alexa regular voice, reading an article about the Grand Central terminal opening in San Francisco:
Listen here to Amazon's NTTS-trained newsreader voice:
The result is still somewhat robotic, but includes some of the inflections often used by newsreaders.
Trevor Wood, who oversees the application of AI in text-to-speech at Amazon, told The Verge: "It's difficult to describe these nuances precisely in words, and a data-driven approach can discover and generalize these more efficiently than a human."
Amazon said it only required a few hours of data to teach Alexa to talk like a newscaster. It will be launching the new voice on enabled devices in a few weeks' time.