Amazon has announced the availability of India’s first celebrity voice feature on Alexa with legendary Bollywood actor Amitabh Bachchan.
Indian customers can choose to add the veteran actor's voice to their Alexa experience on Echo devices or by pressing the mic icon on the Amazon shopping app. The feature is currently only available on Android for an introductory price of ₹149 for one year.
They can purchase the experience by saying “Alexa, introduce me to Amitabh Bachchan” and interact with Bachchan’s voice using the wake word ‘Amit ji’.
Features
The celebrity experience features content handpicked by Bachchan such as stories from his life, a selection of poems by his father, tongue twisters, motivational quotes, etc.
Additionally, users can also ask for music, set alarms and get weather updates in Bachchan’s signature style.
For instance, they can ask, “Amit ji, play songs from Kabhi Kabhi'' or “Amit ji, recite Madhushala."
“Working with Amazon to introduce my voice on Alexa was a new experience in bringing together the magic of voice technology and artistic creativity. I am excited that my well-wishers can now interact with me via this new medium, and looking forward to hear how they feel about this,” said Bachchan.
“At Amazon & Alexa, we consistently innovate on behalf of our customers and building the Amitabh Bachchan celebrity voice experience with one of India’s most iconic voices has been a labor of love. Creating the world’s first bi-lingual celebrity voice required us to invent & re-invent across almost every element of speech science – wake word, speech recognition, neural text-to-speech and more,” said Puneesh Kumar, Country Leader for Alexa, Amazon India.
Users can also ask “Amit ji, what can you do?” to explore more features.
The new voice experience today understands the same languages that Alexa can on the user's compatible devices, Amazon said.
Users can interact with Alexa and Bachchan's voice in English, Hindi or both. To change the language, they go to the device settings on your Alexa app or just say “Alexa, speak in Hindi” to the Echo device. On the Amazon shopping app, Bachchan and Alexa can interact in English only at launch.