Alexa’s Voice Has Been Revealed, Allegedly
After speaking to members of the professional voiceover community and then listening to clips of the voice actor’s voice to verify his research, Stone claims to have worked out who the voice belonged to. Which, according to Stone, is Nina Rolle, a voiceover artist from Colorado.
If you’d like to see for yourself just how much Rolle’s voice sounds like Alexa’s, here’s her voice in an ad on her personal YouTube channel.
Of course, Alexa doesn’t always sound particularly… human (to put it nicely). Alexa constantly takes sound recordings to analyze and produce sentences or phrases. The voice samples get digitized for the AI to use, which is when the more human tones of a voice can get lost.
The Process of Voicing a Digital Assistant
While we still don’t know for sure whether Rolle is the voice of Alexa, we do know that Susan Bennett provided the voice of Siri. And Bennett detailed the process in a 2013 interview with CNN.
Bennett explained that rather than recording a sample for every single word or phrase, the recordings consisted of concatenation of different sounds. For example, one sentence Bennett recorded was “Malitia oi hallucinate, buckry ockra ooze”.
Read More: Alexa, How Does Siri Work? Voice Control Explained
From sentences like these, the AI behind a digital assistant can take the sounds and use them to form words and sentences. This explains why digital assistants don’t always sound quite human.
The Future of Digital Assistants
Stone’s claim that Rolle is the voice behind Alexa shows how humans are still involved in the process of digital assistants. While not recording specific words, the AI still requires people to record the sounds.
In the near future, we will likely see AI finding sound samples from all over the internet, rather than specific recordings, to improve the voicing of the assistant.
