Amazon Alexa to get a special Newscaster Voice
Amazon is developing a customized Alexa Voice to read the news. Currently Alexa reads the news, but uses the same voice when you issue it commands or search results. Amazon has created a special version of the voice that sounds the same as a quintessential evening newscaster.
Everyone is familiar with the “newscaster” voice style; it has a unique flow and emphasis atypical in ordinary conversations. The newscaster voice makes it immediately clear that the user is hearing a news report while helping emphasize key points, break up the information, and state everything clearly.
Amazon says the new speaking style is enabled by by the company’s development of “neural text-to-speech” technology or NTTS. This is the next generation of speech synthesis, that use machine learning to generate expressive voices more quickly. Currently, Alexa uses uses concatenative speech synthesis, a method that’s been around for decades. This involves breaking up speech samples into distinct sounds (known as phonemes) and then stitching them back together to form new words and sentences.
