Amazon has rolled out India’s first celebrity voice feature — and only the fourth in the world — on Alexa with Amitabh Bachchan. The 78-year-old star is providing Amazon with stories from his life, a selection of poems written by his father, Harivanshrai Bachchan, tongue twisters and motivational quotes. Amazon customers can also request Alexa to play songs, set alarms, get weather updates, etc. and get answers in Bachchan’s trademark style.
The company is applying neural speech technology to make Alexa sound like Amitabh even if there is no direct pre-recording. The customer will have to ask for “Amit-ji” to reply. Creating the world’s first bilingual celebrity voice required Amazon to invent and reinvent across almost every element of speech science — wake word, speech recognition, neural text-to-speech etc.
The challenges for Amazon were twofold: the voice had to sound exactly like Bachchan’s because it is recognised by Indians too well, and to use Amit-ji as the wake word (the word which one uses to activate Alexa). Except for this, the wake word has invariably been a single word. The first celebrity voice used by Amazon for Alexa was that of Hollywood actor Samuel L. Jackson. His voice was launched in December 2019.
The work with Amitabh involved tech teams from India, Poland, the UK and the US, and the star recording his voice across many sessions so that the Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems could then work on it.