Updated: Apr 18, 2020, 02:45 PM IST

Amazon introduces long form speaking styles for Alexa skills

Amazon has introduced a new speaking style for Alexa and has also added some speaking styles for other Artificial Intelligence voices, the company said today. According to The Verge, the long-form speaking style is available for US developers who want a reading voice that sounds more natural when reading long pieces of content, like articles or podcasts. Amazon says the long-form style is "powered by a deep-learning text-to-speech model," and allows Alexa-voiced devices to speak with more natural conversational pauses. It follows last year's release of new speaking styles for news and music content and a November update that allows Alexa to seem "disappointed" or "excited." The Multinational tech company is also adding its news and conversational speaking styles for the Matthew and Joanna voices from Amazon Polly, its neural network-based text-to-speech AWS service, and is adding its news speaking style to Lupe, it's US Spanish voice. Polly's speaking style voices, which are available for a few voices, and 10 new Polly voices, are also available for developers to build Alexa skills. The new voices are available in six new languages.