Amazon has announced that a slew of features for its virtual assistant, Amazon Alexa. The company has revealed that users can have a long-term conversation with the Alexa assistant.
The company has also introduced a new speaking style for its assistant. The company says that long-form speaking style is currently available in the US only and there is no information when it will hit other markets. The new feature will help customers to engage with a large amount of content like articles, podcasts and more. Alexa will be able to speak with more natural pauses while going from one paragraph to the next or even from one dialogue to another between different characters. The new feature is powered by a deep-learning text-to-speech model.
Furthermore, the company has revealed that it will be adding new speaking styles to select Amazon Polly voices. The Amazon Polly is the AWS AI service that lets you create life-like speech in 29 languages. Users will have an option to choose news and conversational speaking style for Amazon Polly Matthew and Amazon Polly Joanna voices, and the news speaking style in the US Spanish Amazon Polly voice, Lupe.
“The news speaking style makes the Matthew, Joanna, and Lupe voices sound similar to what you hear from TV news anchors and radio hosts, while the conversational speaking style makes the Matthew and Joanna voices sound less formal and as if they’re speaking to friends and family. The conversational speaking style is only available in select Polly voices and not Alexa’s voice,” the company said in a blog post.