BY TARA MAHADEVAN • SEP 25, 2019

Amazon will add more celebrity guest voices to the platform in 2020, Variety reports. Alexa’s Jackson “voice pack” will be available later this year for a special 99 cent intro price, in both clean and explicit versions.

Amazon was able to include Jackon’s voice due to a new Neural Text-to-Speech technology the company developed. This will make Alexa’s voice sound more human, with better emotive and expressive speech. The technology will also allow Alexa to replicate speech inflections of actual people, as well.

To install the Jackson voice pack, users can say, “Alexa, introduce me to Samuel L. Jackson,” and decide whether they want him to use explicit or censored language. Alexa has featured celebrity voices before, like morning greetings from Chelsea Handler or a duet with Ed Sheeran, though they necessitated pre-recorded audio.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE AT COMPLEX