This week, Amazon announced that its intelligent personal assistant Alexa will be integrating new feature. This updates will allow developers of Alexa Skills to make it sound more expressive and a real human assistant. The Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) will produce a more natural voice to the user.
Voice Assistant Alexa Can Now Whisper And Emphasis
Amazon is making its voice assistant Alexa sound more human. According to Fortune, the firm had updated Alexa's robotic voice so that it can do human skills such as whispering. Aside from that, users can also get Alexa to bleep out swear words in songs, emphasize certain words and speak more gradually.
Alexa is Amazon's answer to rival with other home voice gadget such as the Google Assistant. It has gained adhesion for its ability to answer various questions, turn on lights, order items online and via phone, and even request an Uber car directly. Users will simply give a command to the voice assistant and say “Alexa, order an Uber to home," and it follows through with it.
Voice Assistant Alexa Can Now Do More
Now, there are five additional commands for Alexa - whisper, expletive beeps, sub, emphasis, and prosody. As reported by TechRadar, all of the commands are designed by Amazon itself in order to frame a specific set of words within the script of the voice assistant so she knows which words to apply.
Sub command is when Alexa should substitute a word for another, so if there is an abbreviation in the document that Alexa is reading, a command can be placed for her to sub it in the words. Emphasis adjusts the rate and volume of which Alexa speaks the selected words. If she is about to say an important word or sentence, she can say it louder and slower.
Amazon already revealed that external developers can now obtain the voice recognition technology that powers Alexa. Prosody changes the volume, pitch, as well as rate of speech of Alexa. This command allows the developers to have total control raises or lowers, speeds up or slows down the voice of Alexa.
