“Alexa, try that once more, with feeling.”
Developers can now enable Amazon’s digital assistant to respond with a happy/excited or disappointed/empathetic tone.
Gone are the days when Alexa impassively played The Greatest Showman soundtrack for the 88th time or expressed no judgement as you skipped another news story in the daily roundup.
“Emotional responses are particularly relevant to skills in the gaming and sports categories,” Amazon developer Catherine Gao wrote in a blog announcement.
Tuesday’s launch allows programmers to inject two different speaking styles in the US: news and music.
“The news and music speaking styles tailor Alexa’s voice to the respective content being delivered by changing aspects of speech such as intonation, which words are emphasized, and the timing of pauses,” Gao explained.
During “blind listening” tests, the news style was perceived to be 31 percent more natural than Alexa’s standard tones; that number jumped to 84 percent for music.
The trick, according to Amazon, is a neutral text-to-speech (NTTS) technology that delivers a more natural-sounding voice. Using direct waveform modeling, scientists apply deep learning to produce speech signal.
As a result, Alexa has better enunciation and emphasizes the right words in a sentence. Depending on your request, she can even adapt her speaking style.
Listen to the robot’s varying levels of intensity—low, medium, high—in audio clips below. And try not to feel too spooked by her oddly familiar inflections.
Moving forward, developers may want to beef up their apps by having Alexa respond in a happy or excited tone when someone answers a trivial question correctly, for instance. Or allow her to sympathize with folks asking for the sports score when their favorite team has lost.
“Early customer feedback indicates that overall satisfaction with the voice experience increased by 30 percent when Alexa responded with emotions,” Gao said.
To get started with Alexa emotions, simply use the newly published SSML tags, available via the Alexa Skills Kit Blog.
More on Geek.com:
- McDonald’s Taps Alexa to Recruit New Hires
- Alexa Lets You Donate School Supplies to Students in Need
- World’s First Genderless Voice Assistant Needs Your Help
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