Amazon are taking it back to the golden era of TomTom navigation systems. You remember those glory day? Where you’d make your parent that was already incredibly stressed out about having to drive into the city even more stressed out by changing the voice of their electronic navigation sidekick to Alan Rickman in Harry Potter? Life was just so much richer back then.
In absolutely superb news, Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa and her tinny little voice are about to get the flick in favour of the omnipotent voice of Samuel L. Jackson.
Jackson is the first to sign a deal with Amazon to become Alexa’s first celebrity voice option, and honestly, we couldn’t have dreamt up a better captain to man this ship. Samuel L. Jackson’s vocal gymnastics? unparalleled. From the dulcet, warm tones of Frozone to his campy, lisp-afflicted jive in Kingsman, he has a voice for every occasion.
In the interest of clarity, Samuel L. Jackson will not be holed up in an evil Amazon studio for days on end recording mundane phrases just so he can wish you good morning. Amazon will be utilizing their Neural Text-to-Speech technology to generate a synthesized version of Jackon’s vocals.
This technology will limit the phrases that the Alexa incarnate of Jackson will have on the back burner, so, unfortunately, the man with the illustrious, four-decade-long career in acting will not be able to recite your grocery list to you.
In the $US0.99 package Jackson will be able to tell you the weather, make jokes, act as an alarm clock and perform other regular Alexa features.
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