Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Amazon announced today that it will now work with brands to help them make custom text-to-speech voices for their Alexa skills. Imagine, for example, that you’re ordering KFC using KFC’s Alexa skill, but instead of the default Alexa voice replying to you, it’s Colonel Sanders himself. That’s what Amazon’s going for here, and it’s something that Amazon and KFC actually developed.
The brand voices are offered through Amazon Polly, an Alexa service that previously supplied neural network-based text-to-speech services for companies to use to add realistic voices to their Alexa skills. Now, though, Amazon is offering its neutral network-based TTS technology to create custom voices for a specific brand based on recordings of voices of an actor…