Amazon Alexa has a very huge market globally. The craze for this very useful gadget has increased in the country gradually. The patented Alexa voice has also become famous.
For the first time ever, Amazon has rolled out an Indian celebrity’s voice on Alexa featuring the nation’s biggest movie star Amitabh Bachchan. This step has been taken to lure more users of the world’s second-most populated nation.
The news was shared by Amitabh Bachchan himself through his Twitter handle wherein he expressed his excitement to join the tech giant.
T 4003 – Another day .. another beginning .. another connect .. with you .. now on #Alexa .. ask and ye shall hear .. !! 🙏@AmazonAlexaIN @amazonIN pic.twitter.com/oSk488Muz6
— Amitabh Bachchan (@SrBachchan) August 19, 2021
As per the company, Indian users can add the Bollywood legend’s voice to their Echo devices or Amazon shopping app for an introductory price of 149 Indian rupees for the first year.
To activate the voice on Alexa-enabled Echo devices, you simply have to say, “Alexa, introduce me to Amitabh Bachchan” and you will be able to purchase the feature.
Amazon had announced its collaboration with Mr. Bachchan in September 2020. However, due to the pandemic, Amazon’s engineering teams were forced to work remotely for this project.
To make things more interesting, Amazon has introduced a two-word wake system to Alexa, ‘Amit Ji’. Globally, users can trigger Alexa with a one-word wake alert, ‘Alexa’. But especially for the Indian market and to pay respect to the veteran actor, Amazon added the Hindi word ‘Ji’ to the wake alert.
Puneesh Kumar, country leader for Alexa, Amazon India, in a statement that the company consistently innovates on behalf of their customers.
Building the Amitabh Bachchan celebrity voice experience with one of India’s most iconic voices has been a labor of love, Puneesh added. He further stated that creating the world’s first bilingual celebrity voice required the company to invent and reinvent across almost every element of speech science — wake word, speech recognition, neural text-to-speech, and more.
