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.
Amazon says this will allow Alexa to provide a “more natural voice experience.” Honestly, I never thought about why Alexa can’t whisper, but I can definitely see how it’ll make its vaguely robotic voice sound more believable and human. Unfortunately, we...
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from
http://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/4/28/15475070/amazon-alexa-speech-synthesis-markup-language
from
http://ifeeltechinc.blogspot.com/2017/04/amazons-alexa-can-now-whisper-bleep-out.html