Alexa finally gets male-sounding voice option

Amazon has quietly started rolling out a new male-sounding voice option in its virtual assistant Alexa, along with a similar-sounding wake-up call to trigger the assistant: “Ziggy.” (The odd choice of name likely matches Amazon’s love for the ‘A to Z’ style brand.)

The new voice option was actually added several days ago alongside an announcement for new celebrity voices like Shaq and Melissa McCarthy, but it went largely unnoticed until it was spotted by Ambient. You can hear a sample of the new voice option here.

The “Ziggy” wake word joins the existing “Alexa”, “Computer”, “Echo” and “Amazon” wake words that have already been available for use with Alexa for years. Amazon doesn’t specifically associate “Alexa” with the female voice and “Ziggy” with the new male-sounding option; users can use any of the voice options with any of the wake-up words.

You can toggle between the two voice options – which Amazon calls “Original” and “New” – by asking Alexa to “Change your voice,” and you can also select a new wake-up word by asking them to “Edit your word. alarm clock. ”However, the change appears to be device-specific, so you’ll need to set the new voice on each of your Alexa devices.

Amazon has been a drag when it comes to offering a male-sounding voice option for its digital assistant; Apple and Google respectively offer several voice options for Siri and Google Assistant. None of these companies associate gender-specific voices more: Apple’s Siri options are shown as “Voice 1” and “Voice 2,” while Google’s voice options are listed in different colors.

Amazon has only offered its female-sounding option since the Echo launched in 2013. And although the New York Times notes that Alexa will answer questions about gender by answering “I’m not a woman or a man, I’m an AI”, Amazon itself always tends to refer to Alexa’s personality using gendered pronouns “She” and “his” in its documentation.

It is despite this same documentation pointing out that Alexa is not “a person with a physical body or a gender identity” and that “Amazon does not allow organizations (for example, skills or AVS) to refer to Alexa as “she” or “she”. ‘”

The new male-sounding Alexa voice option would only be available in the United States for now, but it will likely be available in other regions soon.