Amazon's Alexa can now whisper, bleep


New York, Apr 29 (IANS): In a bid to provide more natural voice experience, Amazon has introduced new "Speech Synthesis Markup Language"(SSML) features to its voice assistant Alexa that allows it to whisper, bleep and even change its pitch.

SSML is a standardised markup language that allows developers to control pronunciation, intonation, timing and emotion.

"We are excited to announce five new SSML tags in the US, Britain and Germany that you can use with Alexa, including whispers, expletive bleeps and more," the company said in a statement.

SSML support on Alexa allows users to control how Alexa generates speech from their skill's text responses. Developers can add pauses, change pronunciation, spell out a word and add short audio snippets.

Amazon is set to host a webinar on May 18 on the new code, that will give a more clear idea on SSML.

  

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Comment on this article

  • Jack Smith, Somers

    Sat, Apr 29 2017

    Instead of this silliness give us voice identification like Google Home. We have both the Echo and the Google Home (GH). In the kitchen now one of my kids asks for a song to play and it plays from their Spotify account and me I get YouTube Red. It just is smart and knows.

    But the biggest plus is for home automation and controlling who can do what. So my kids can not lower the AC. So when they ask no go and me and wife it does what we ask. No passcodes like the Echo which is rather ridiculous, IMO, as people just overhear.

    Better is our guest can do some things in our home and not others. They have zero clue as I always hated having a passcode as it was obvious we did not trust them to do things like turn up the hot tub. Now they have no idea they can not. If they did ask when we are not around they have no idea why it does not work.

    Amazon needs to add this to the Echo, ASAP.

    DisAgree Agree Reply Report Abuse


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