Samuel L. Jackson inked a deal with Amazon to provide first celebrity voice option for Alexa, its cloud-based digital assistant. According to the ecommerce giant, it will add more celebrity guest voices for the platform starting in 2020. The Jackson “voice pack” for Alexa will be available later this year for the special intro price of 99 cents — and users can select either clean and explicit modes.
The Hollywood star is the first celebrity voice to be rolled out on Alexa, in a feature that will be made available to users later this year for a fee, according an announcement by the tech and retail giant on Wednesday.
The Jackson feature will allow users of Alexa-enabled devices to interact with an AI version of the actor developed using the company’s neural text-to-speech technology. Jackson is not the first celebrity to feature on Alexa, but previous celebrity voice features have relied upon pre-recorded audio.
The Alexa feature promises to make liberal use of Jackson’s reputation for colorful language, but users will have the capacity to turn swearing on and off.
Amazon suggested on Wednesday that more celebrity voices will be added in 2020.
