Amazon Calls it Quits on Celebrity Voices for Alexa
Amazon has announced that it will be discontinuing its celebrity voices feature for Alexa. The feature included the voices of celebrities like Samuel L. Jackson, Shaquille O’Neal, and Melissa McCarthy. Despite being no longer available for purchase, Amazon assured that it would continue to support these celebrity voices on Alexa devices for a limited time.
The celebrity voices feature was launched with a $0.99 price tag before increasing to $4.99, allowing users to interact with Alexa in the voice of their preferred celebrity. Users could use commands such as “Hey [celebrity name]” to ask questions, hear jokes, or listen to a story, all voiced by Jackson, O’Neal, or McCarthy. However, this feature will soon be unavailable, with the voice of Samuel L. Jackson stopping on June 7th. The voices of McCarthy and O’Neal will continue to be supported until September 30th of this year.
Amazon first introduced Jackson’s voice in 2019, leveraging its neural text-to-speech model to generate responses. The voices of McCarthy and O’Neal were added later in 2021. However, the functionality of these celebrity voices was somewhat limited. They did not support tasks such as working with shopping lists, reminders, or Alexa skills.
The exact reasons for discontinuing the celebrity voices feature remain unclear. Some industry observers speculate that this decision could be part of Amazon’s broader strategy given the challenges Alexa has faced in recent years. In November, a report from The Wall Street Journal revealed that Amazon’s Alexa sector had been under close scrutiny by CEO Andy Jassy due to operating losses exceeding $5 million. This scrutiny coincided with layoffs affecting 18,000 employees, with 2,000 of those cuts affecting the division responsible for Alexa and Echo products.
In light of these developments, the company is reportedly planning a rework of Alexa to make it “more proactive and conversational”, possibly leveraging its own large language model (LLM) in response to the rise of AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The shift in strategy may indicate that Alexa’s celebrity voices do not align with this new vision, or it could simply be that the licensing costs for the celebrity voices have become prohibitive.
Amazon has confirmed that customers who have purchased the celebrity voices feature can contact their customer service team for a refund. The company has also updated the pages for the celebrity voices on their website, noting the discontinuation dates.
As this change takes effect, it will be interesting to see how Amazon’s strategies evolve in response to shifts in the AI and voice assistant landscape. Whether this marks the end of celebrity voices in voice assistants or simply a pause before a new chapter, remains to be seen.
