Amazon Alexa can now recognise different voices; ready for personalised responses with voice profiles

Alexa, Amazon’s digital assistant can now recognise different voices to ensure that the responses are personalised for each user. [caption id=“attachment_4110183” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] The Amazon Echo. Image: Amazon[/caption] This means that multiple users can ask Alexa for their calendar, contacts, emails or curate music lists and the digital assistant would carry out personalised commands depending on the user. With the introduction of this feature, Amazon is playing catch-up with the competition as Google announced the roll-out of this feature for its Home devices, back in April. Users can set up ‘ Alexa Voice Profiles’ on Amazon Echo, Echo Dot and Echo Show where the device asks the user to read 10 phrases aloud. According to a report by The Verge, Alexa records and uses the data from the 10 phrases to create the voice profile. The interesting thing to note here is that this process is a one-time thing and the voice profiles work across all other Echo devices and ‘most’ third-party Alexa-powered devices. [caption id=“attachment_4134669” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”] Image credit: Amazon[/caption] The company stated that currently this feature is available to carry out calls and sending messages along with flash briefing, Amazon Music Unlimited Family Plan, and last but not the least, shopping. The company claims that the voice recognition will get ‘smarter over time’ and it will roll out to more Alexa features in the future. One thing to note here is that ‘touch-to-talk’ devices like the Amazon Tap or Fire TV remote will not support voice profiles.