Amazon Alexa's voice will now express emotions such as happiness and disappointment

Amazon wants Alexa to be less robotic and wants it to have some emotions to its speaking style.

“Starting today, you can enable Alexa to respond with either a “happy/excited” or a “disappointed/empathetic” tone in the US. Emotional responses are particularly relevant to skills in the gaming and sports categories. Additionally, you can have Alexa respond in a speaking style that is more suited for a specific type of content, starting with news and music,” said an Amazon blog post.

The idea is to have developers program Alexa skills with the two emotional tones in the voice responses. According to Amazon, the ‘happy/excited’ tone could be activated when you answer a trivia question correctly and the ‘disappointed/empathetic’ tone could be activated when you hear news of your favourite football team losing a match.

Amazon states that Alexa emotions make use of Neural text to speech (NTTS) technology which is an Amazon text to speech tech geared towards more natural-sounding speech.

The two emotions excited and disappointed have low, medium and high intensity. On the surface, it looks quite subtle, but you do notice the change in the tone of speaking when listening to the examples on the Amazon blog page.

In addition to the emotional tone update, US users can also enable two different speaking styles in the US: News and Music.

“The news and music speaking styles tailor Alexa’s voice to the respective content being delivered by changing aspects of speech such as intonation, which words are emphasised, and the timing of pauses. While conducting ‘blind listening’ tests, the news style was perceived to be 31 percent more natural than Alexa’s standard voice and the music style was perceived to be 84 percent more natural,” states Amazon.