Ever find Alexa sounds a bit stiff when speaking anything but short responses to your requests? The voice-activated smart assistant should start to loosen up in the future, as Amazon is releasing a new speaking style for Alexa.
Designed to make Alexa's voice for narrating news, podcasts and stories sound more natural, developers will be able to switch on the new voice style in their skills.
Using a deep-learning model, Alexa will take longer pauses between paragraphs, and when changing characters in spoken dialogue.
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It's a subtle but welcome change – listen to some samples of the new voice in action here.
Amazon first mentioned the introduction of new voices at the end of 2019, with an aim to make the Echo speakers' go-to voice better suited to reading back ebooks and long-form news pieces.
For now, the new voice option is exclusive to the US, but we'd expect the feature will roll out to worldwide languages and Alexa accents before too long.
