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Amazon's Alexa Can Now Whisper, Bleep Out Swear Words, and Change Its Pitch (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Amazon is trying to make its Alexa voice assistant sound more humanlike. Up until now, the female-sounding voice maintained an even, monotone cadence whenever speaking, but with Amazon's new Speech Synthesis Markup Language that the company introduced this week, Alexa can whisper, vary its speaking speed, and bleep out words. Developers can also add pauses, change the pronunciation of a word, spell a word out, add audio snippets, and insert special words and phrases into their skill. The Verge notes that "the language markups are [only] available to developers in the U.S., U.K. and Germany." Amazon will also be hosting a webinar on May 18th on the new code.
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-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Look at what Alexa's done to you already. NPR, rain sounds and metric.
Seek help immediately, or you'll soon be ordering salt lamps and a Juicero.
You are welcome on my lawn.
That's not what monotone means. Alexa is anything *but* monotone and the author would know this if they ever actually used the service. The voice is moderatly "sing-song" cadence like a radio news reader.
Kriston