NE BUSINESS BUREAU
NEW DELHI, AUG 19
Amazon on Thursday said megastar Amitabh Bachchan’s voice will now be available on Alexa that will allow users to ask for music, set alarms and even get weather updates in Bachchan’s signature style.
In September last year, Amazon had announced its partnership with Bachchan for creating a unique user experience on Alexa-enabled devices.
This is India’s first celebrity voice feature on Alexa, Amazon’s digital assistant Alexa that is available on Echo devices, Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote, Fire TV Edition apart from the Alexa app.
“Indian customers can choose to add Bachchan’s voice to their Alexa experience on Echo devices or by pressing the mic icon on the Amazon shopping app (Android only) for an introductory price of Rs 149 for one year,” a statement said.
Users need to say “Alexa, introduce me to Amitabh Bachchan” to start the purchase and interact with Bachchan’s voice using the wake word ”Amit ji”.
The celebrity experience features content handpicked by Bachchan — stories from his life, a selection of poems by his father, tongue twisters, motivational quotes and others, the statement said.
In addition, customers can also ask for music, set alarms and get weather updates in Bachchan”s signature style, it added.
Users can ask “Amit ji, play songs from Kabhi Kabhi”, “Amitji, Sholay ke gaane bajaiye” or “Amit ji, tell us a funny story” to hear some fun behind-the-scenes info.
Users can also add a special touch to birthday celebrations with greetings in Amitabh Bachchan”s voice by saying “Amit ji, it”s my birthday”.
“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,” Bachchan said.
Puneesh Kumar, country leader for Alexa at Amazon India, said, “Building the Amitabh Bachchan celebrity voice experience with one of India”s most iconic voices has been a labour of love.”
“Creating the world’s first bi-lingual celebrity voice required us to invent and re-invent across almost every element of speech science – wake word, speech recognition, neural text-to-speech and more,” he said.
