Amazon on Thursday said it has made India’s first celebrity voice feature on Alexa available with the legendary Amitabh Bachchan, and the users in India can add his amazing voice to their Alexa experience on Echo devices for an introductory price of Rs 149 for one year.
The customers need to press the mic icon on the Amazon shopping app (Android only) and say “Alexa, introduce me to Amitabh Bachchan” to start the purchase and interact with Bachchan’s voice using the wake word ‘Amit ji’.
The company said that the celebrity experience features content handpicked by Bachchan includes stories from his life, a selection of poems by his father, tongue twisters, motivational quotes, and more.
“Working with Amazon to introduce my voice on Alexa was a new experience in bringing together the magic of voice technology and artistic creativity. I am excited that my well-wishers can now interact with me via this new medium and looking forward to hear how they feel about this,” said Bachchan.
In addition to this unique and entertaining content, customers can also ask for music, set alarms and get weather updates in Bachchan’s signature style.
“Creating the world’s first bi-lingual celebrity voice required us to invent & re-invent across almost every element of speech science – wake word, speech recognition, neural text-to-speech and more,” said Puneesh Kumar, Country Leader for Alexa, Amazon India.
Amazon Alexa in September last year announced a partnership with Bachchan to create a unique voice experience for its Indian fans.
Alexa in the US already has voices of several celebrities like Samuel L. Jackson, but this is the first time that the Indian Alexa has received the voice of a Bollywood celebrity.