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Jackson fans, you’re going to be happy to hear this news: the famous voice of Sam Jackson is being added to the celebrity voices you can use for your Amazon Alexa.
And how much will having Nick Fury himself be the voice of your virtual assistant cost? Why, a measly $.99. What’s not to love?
Yes, we are freaking serious. Sam Jackson’s legendary voice was announced as an option for Alexa at Amazon’s recent hardware event. The technology behind it is fascinating: rather than having Sam read a ton of words off and just using those, the tech will instead rely on neural text-to-speech with learning algorithms.
This means that the technology needs only a sampling of Jackson’s speech to reconstruct a passable facsimile of his speaking voice. The results are surprisingly realistic, which begs the question: could Amazon do this for anyone? What’s stopping them from reconstructing the voices of now-deceased celebrities? Spooky stuff!
Once you buy the voice pack, you need only ask Alexa to “introduce me to Samuel L Jackson” to activate the voice option. You can pick between the normal, R-rated, profanity-laden version of Jackson, or the more family-friendly, PG version. Though, frankly, if you’re spending a dollar to turn your Echo into Sam Jackson, you’d better use the unfiltered voice.
Interestingly, Amazon clarified that the celebrity voice would be unable to read out your shopping lists or diary reminders, suggesting that the technology does have its limitations. That being said, the voice pack comes with a number of fun commands, including the option to have Sam Jackson be your alarm clock.
At the time of this writing, there’s no word on other celebrities that could be coming to the Amazon Alexa voice family. For our part, we’d love a Christopher Walken voice, or maybe Ving Rhames. Frankly, any of the cast from Pulp Fiction would be downright hilarious to have as your virtual assistant.
If you’re interested in downloading the Sam Jackson voice for your Alexa, you can do so starting later this year. Jackson’s the first celebrity to officially sign up for this experiment, though we’d be surprised if he was the last.
