Alexa’s Indian celebrity voice: Amit Ji

Amazon India has played strategically to promote it’s voice assistant or virtual assistant Alexa by collaborating with megastar Amitabh Bachchan.

A cover photo from Bachchan Bol: Amit ji ’s blog on tumblr

Amazon’s creative team knows that Amitabh Bachchan is accepted across India with all generations. North to South India and Hindi to English speaking audience. You could compare his deep voiceovers to Morgan Freeman.

Currently, Amit Ji (celerity voice) is available only in English on Amazon Mobile App but on Smart speakers it works in Hindi as well.

Why they left out Hindi on Mobile App? My guess is the very purpose of supporting Hindi only on smart speakers is to prompt users to buy and adopt the voice assistants.

Amazon Echo and Echo Dot Smart Speakers with Alexa voice assistant

Recently, I purchased the Amit Ji voice for Alexa to study how it works and what features do these add on voices have.

Amazon Mobile App is like a sea of features. After seeing the advertisement on YouTube I tried to purchase it… It was very easy to search and find the celebrity voice for Alexa but setting it up was pretty confusing. The setup instructions are designed for the Smart speaker and companion Alexa App not for Amazon Mobile App.

Before I purchased it, I carefully experienced the recorded demo which Alexa gives to introduce the Amit Ji voice and features. And here is the video of my experience.

Currently, there are limited tasks which Amit ji voice executes but so is Alexa. Voice Assistants have been around for many years but speech recognition is still very limited across the assistants of different brands Google, Samsung Bixby, Apple Siri etc. It’s not really as smooth as they show in their promo videos or advertisements.

Only Google assistant has reached to a decent level speech recognition and the reason is crestal clear… they have tons of voice search data to feed their voice recognition AI.

Samsung Bixby and Siri are very limited from India’s perspective. They don’t support regional languages and even Indian English accent is not taken in considerations. At the most they can only tell you What’s the time that also after 2 or 3 times of try.

But I am really surprised how Alexa can recognize so much without having that much of voice search data? How do they create voice profile and prompts only in one time setup in my opinion that is remarkable feat.

There are some user friendly suggestions to Alexa team for Amazon Mobile App. After you have purchased the celebrity's voice it does not reflect in the app UI and to activate Amit Ji voice you need to give command to Alexa’s default virtual voice assistant. Please, see the images below:

[1]

animated GIF suggesting how the App UI should reflect the purchase and for easy voice switch or toggle.

[2]

animated GIF suggesting how the App UI should reflect the purchase. Here is the active state of Alexa should look like.

And here is the full length still image showing the UI suggestions to reflect the purchase.

Still image to show UI suggestions to reflect the purchase.

I am really curious about a few things:

[A] is it Amitabh Bachchan’s real voice recorded and fed to virtual assistant engine? thus the limited tasks and answers are available.

[B] or they have managed to recreate the it digitally? If so! why limited features??

🤩Feature That will below the mind! 🤯

If they are able to give a text to speech feature in this purchase then you can not imagine 😶‍🌫 ️what the users will do with the feature.

anyway…

Amazon has a duet song with Amitabh Bachchan and Alexa to delight it’s users and for promoting the voice assistant/ smart speakers. listening to it was fun and it’s done in a very jolly flavor.

Here is a clipping from the song:

Amit Ji and Alexa duet

If you are going to buy Amit Ji voice then don’t forget to ask him and tell a story from SHOLAY. Amitabh Bachchan narrates the story in his on flavor and you as a user feel connected sitting with him… may be interviewing him, kind of feel.

KNOW MORE ABOUT HIM

Here is the link to his official blog: Amitabh Bachchan’s Blog on tumblr

You can read more about him on Wikipedia and get to know why he is called megastar! Here is the link: About Amitabh Bachchan on Wikipedia

Disclaimer: All the images/screenshots, videos, and links shown here belong to respected owners and are shared here for review and appreciation purposes.

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