Amazon has introduced a new speaking style for Alexa and also added some speaking styles for another Artificial Intelligence (AI) voice.
Amazon’s Alexa Longform speaking style: In November 2019, Amazon stated the availability of new Alexa speaking styles for news and music content in your skills. In April, Amazon said, “we are excited to introduce three new capabilities that will help create a more natural and intuitive voice experience for your customers.”
Long-Form Speaking Style (US only)
Extending Speaking Styles to Select Amazon Polly Voices
More Amazon Polly Voices for Skills
Long-Form Speaking Style (US only)
The new long-form speaking style (available in the US only) can assist customers in joining with vast amounts of content or data such as articles, podcasts, and other longer-form content. For example, users can use this speaking style for customers who need to have the content on a web page read to them or listen to a storytelling section in a game.
Powered by a deep-learning text-to-speech model, the long-form speaking style allows Alexa to speak with more regular pauses while going from one paragraph to the following or even from one dialogue to another between different characters.
Extending Speaking Styles to Select Amazon Polly Voices
Using Amazon Polly voices in your skills can produce a more engaging and enhanced customer experience. For example, My Spaceship Alexa skill enables a unique customer experience with its use of multiple characters with various Amazon Polly voices.
Additionally, customers can use the news speaking style in the US Spanish Amazon Polly voice, Lupe. The news speaking style performs the Matthew, Joanna, and Lupe voices sound similar to what you hear from TV news anchors and radio hosts. In contrast, the conversational speaking style performs the Matthew and Joanna voices sound less formal and as if they’re speaking to friends and family.
More Amazon Polly Voices for Skills
Finally, you can also use 10 additional Amazon Polly voices in 6 new languages (es-US, es-MX, fr-CA, pt-BR, es-ES, and it-IT).