Amazon upgrades Alexa with newscaster voice

If you're in the US and ask Alexa to reel off the latest news today through your smart speaker, she's going to sound a bit more professional than on previous days. That's because Amazon performed an upgrade and gave her a professional newscaster speaking style for conveying such information.

As TechCrunch reports, Amazon's aim was a more realistic delivery of the news. In order to achieve that, Amazon turned to a neural text-to-speech (NTTS) system which learned to use a newscaster style from just a few hours of trainingDetails of the NTTS were revealed by Amazon last November, but it's only now that the newscaster voice variation is ready for Alexa to use. Read more...