New Alexa Emotions

New complexity in voice expression is announced for Alexa.  Need to see this in useful context, but intrigued by possibilities.

Use New Alexa Emotions and Speaking Styles to Create a More Natural and Intuitive Voice Experience      By Catherine Gao

We’re excited to introduce two new Alexa capabilities that will help create a more natural and intuitive voice experience for your customers. 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. Speaking styles are curated text-to-speech voices designed to create a more delightful customer experience for specific content. For example, the news speaking style makes Alexa’s voice sound similar to what you hear from TV news anchors and radio hosts. To learn more, check out our technical documentation for emotions here and speaking styles here.

How Alexa Emotions Work
Alexa emotions use Neural TTS (NTTS) technology, Amazon’s text-to-speech technology that enables more natural sounding speech. For example, you can have Alexa respond in a happy/excited tone when a customer answers a trivia question correctly or wins a game. Similarly, you can have Alexa respond in a disappointed/empathetic tone when a customer asks for the sports score and their favorite team has lost. Early customer feedback indicates that overall satisfaction with the voice experience increased by 30% when Alexa responded with emotions. Check out the following examples and compare them to the neutral tone:  .... '