Amazon Upgrades Alexa With Professional Newscaster Voice
Amazon introduces a professional newscaster voice for Alexa that uses advanced neural text-to-speech technology to emphasize the right words when reading the news. This contextual adaptation allows the assistant to sound more natural and paves the way for future speaking styles.
Amazon gives Alexa a new "newscaster" voice for U.S. customers who ask for the latest news. Instead of her standard tone, Alexa uses a professional delivery that emphasizes the correct words for a more realistic listening experience. This change builds on Amazon's recent addition of a whisper mode for its popular voice assistant.
The company achieves this new speaking style through its Neural TTS (NTTS) technology. By applying deep learning and direct waveform modeling, the system produces speech with better intonation and context awareness. Researchers previously noted that this advanced system requires only a few hours of training data to master the newscaster style.
Amazon views this contextual voice adaptation as a major breakthrough for the future of voice interfaces. The technology currently helps Alexa sound more neutral when reading Wikipedia entries and more authoritative when delivering news. Scientists believe this development opens the door for the assistant to adopt various other speaking styles for different situations down the road.