Amazon ditches Alexa’s celebrity voices and will issue refunds upon request
To the uninitiated, this feature was an add-on for Alexa that transformed its usual chirpy tones into that of a celebrity. This was all fairly limited when compared to Alexa’s full feature set, as the celebs won’t do reminders and don’t integrate with many skills. They do, however, tell jokes, answer questions and complete simple voice-assisted tasks. The service started with Jackson in 2019 but extended to include Shaq and McCarthy shortly thereafter.
So why did Amazon shut the feature down? Alexa’s no longer the hottest thing in the universe and the company’s hardware divisioninvolved with designing and manufacturing Echo speakers, so that could be part of it. Again, the feature set with these voices was on the anemic side, so maybe not enough people bought them to offset the licensing costs. Finally, there’s the AI elephant in the room.
is building its own large language model like ChatGPT to radically transform Alexa, and celebrity voices may no longer fit into that vision.This story has been updated to include a statement from Amazon.
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