Samuel L. Jackson is set to be the first celebrity voice that can be swapped out for Alexa on Amazon’s Echo devices.
For 99 cents, Alexa’s Jackson “voice pack” will be available later this year at that discounted price. After that, the price jumps to $4.99, according to Geek Wire.
Both clean and explicit versions will be available.
Insider reported that Echo’s Jackson can tell jokes, report the weather, set timers and alarms, and play music — all the while using the actor’s edgy personality.
Amazon has a new “neural text to speech” engine that allows Alexa to mimic celebrity’s voices (with their permission). Samuel L Jackson is rolling out later this year. pic.twitter.com/vvh9XR7znn
— nic nguyen (@itsnicolenguyen) September 25, 2019
Amazon will add other celebrity voices next year.
The company is able to use the celebrity voices using Amazon’s recently-developed nueral text-to-speech technology.
Boom!
In the 2000s I worked with the largest artist rights management companies in Hollywood to allow for actors to have rights/control over their vocal likeness.
Today these protections helped Samuel L. Jackson
Echo users can replace Alexa with Samuel L. Jackson's voice. pic.twitter.com/32U3DwkKHI
— Brian Roemmele (@BrianRoemmele) September 26, 2019
Jackson’s films are among the highest grossing of his time.
Some of those titles include: “Pulp Fiction,” “Snakes on a Plane,” “Django Unchained” and “Unbreakable,” and as Nick Fury in Marvel’s “The Avengers” franchise. He even had small parts in “Coming to America” and Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” — where he opens the film as a DJ giving the weather report.
