Now you can speak with Amitabh Bachchan on Alexa. Amazon launch the voice of the 78-year-old Bollywood star as a part of its efforts to amuse existing users and attract new consumers to use its voice assistant over Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri.
Amazon has also brought its celebrity voice feature to India.
How to Use Amitabh Bachchan’s Voice on Alexa?
Amazon has made Amitabh Bachchan’s voice available on Alexa at an introductory price of Rs. 149 (MRP Rs. 299) for one year.
You need to say, “Alexa, introduce me to Amitabh Bachchan” to purchase the celebrity voice.
You can also get it directly from the Amazon site.
When the payment is confirm you will be able to start interacting with the actor’s voice.
You can also interact with Amitabh Bachchan’s voice using the wake word “Amit ji”.
It will work alongside the default “Alexa” wake word.
This means that you can call the voice assistant by using the wake word “Alexa” and at the same time use “Amit ji” to speak with the actor’s voice.
Amazon work on enabling Amitabh Bachchan’s voice on Alexa for the last few months.
The new experience is aim to please his fans and attract new users to the voice assistant.
Challenges in bringing the Amitabh Bachchan’s Voice.
Amazon starts its work on the Amitabh Bachchan’s voice last year amid the COVID-19 pandemic and national lockdowns.
Due to the restrictions the different engineering teams at the company work remotely from various locations, including Boston, Poland, Seattle, and the UK, Puneesh Kumar, Country Leader for Alexa, Amazon India.
Amazon engineers use transfer learning to build the celebrity voice from remote locations.
Manoj Sidhwani, Vice President of Alexa Speech, Amazon Said :
“In transfer learning, you teach the models to learn skills in one domain,”
“And then you take that learning and start transferring it to a second domain. So we started by creating a wake word model that had a medium-sized vocabulary… And then have to also deal with the fact that it has to work in a lot of conditions including different noise profiles.”
“We’ve to put a lot of energy into making sure that a voice that everybody recognises, they would recognise every single flaw. It’s not like my voice that nobody knows and even if there are certain flaws, people will not notice,”.
This was also the first time when Amazon has brought a two-word wake word to Alexa.
Amazon use a multiple simultaneous wake word technology along with a multi-target learning to enable its voice assistant to use the two-word wake word alongside detecting the regular one-word “Alexa” wake word.
The advancements enable Alexa to work with a mix of two-word wake word and a single-word wake word simultaneously.
It is important to note that you won’t get Amitabh Bachchan’s voice for all your queries.
General information-requiring queries such as arithmetic problems and geographical questions will still be answer in Alexa’s own voice.
It was intentional as of bringing celebrity voices to Alexa is to make people interact with celebrities and not to replace the original voice.
Initially Amitabh Bachchan’s voice is limited to Echo devices.
Users on the Amazon shopping app on Android devices will also be able to interact with the new voice but only in English in the initial stage.
Amazon decided to keep it in a limited manner at launch as it requires multi-simultaneous wake words that are difficult to enable across Alexa-supported devices.
Would You Pay for this New Experience?
Amitabh Bachchan’s voice on Alexa is going to be an exciting thing for his fans.
But would you be willing to pay for the experience?
For this project Amazon is quite optimistic.
Unlike Amitabh Bachchan who has fans not just in India but also in some other parts of the world, his voice on Alexa is currently exclusive to Indian users.
And if you are not in the country then you can use the voice by switching your Alexa’s settings to India.
Competition with Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri.
India already has a huge potential for Amazon to improve its Alexa and make a stronger competitor against Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri.
Amazon introduced Hindi to the voice assistant in July 2019 and enabled a multilingual mode in September that year.
These type of moves are helping Amazon to take Alexa to new levels.
There are also 30,000 skills, including over 1,000 skills particularly in Hindi to make the voice assistant a more useful artificial intelligence (AI) product.
Many of these skills are coming from third-party developers.
Amazon told that there are 100,000 developers from India that are building new experiences for Alexa globally.
Market experts don’t think that the celebrity voice feature would help Alexa to make any further success in the ever-growing market of voice assistants.
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