Samuel L. Jackson Is The New Voice Of Alexa, Is This Real Life

Amazon’s Alexa has been the subject of a lot of debates, on one hand it’s a super helpful assistive device capable of a lot of pretty neat things, on the other hand it’s definitely listening to you all the time and is straight up Big Brother-y. Pros and cons. Whatever your feelings are about Alexa, Amazon made an announcement today that is objectively cool as all hell.

Most assistive software or devices like Alexa, Siri, and GPS are programed with a female voice, either as a default that you can customize in settings (I set my Siri to have the voice of an Australian man for… reasons) or as a fixed, unmodifiable feature, as is the case with Alexa — well, was the case.

During their annual Amazon Devices event in Seattle today, it was announced that one of the newest add-ons that will be made available by the end of 2019 is a voice pack featuring

SAMUEL L. JACKSON

FOR $0.99

Once you install the voice pack, apparently you have to ask Alexa to INTRODUCE YOU TO SAMUEL L. JACKSON, WHICH IS A SENTENCE I HAVE NEVER EVEN DREAMED I WOULD SAY.

And thanks to their new text-to-speech technology, this voice pack doesn’t rely on pre-recorded words or sentences. It synthesizes Samuel L. Jackson’s voice and inflections, meaning that YOU CAN ESSENTIALLY HAVE FULL ON CONVERSATIONS ABOUT WHATEVER YOU WANT WITH ROBOT SAM JACKSON… FOR A DOLLAR.

WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE.

You can read all about the more techy stuff from this event in Variety’s coverage here.

Published at Wed, 25 Sep 2019 23:29:51 +0000