Amazon Alexa Now Gets The Ability To Recognize Different Voices

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Amazon Alexa has gotten smarter as it can now recognize different voices and personalize its services for multiple users. The smart update to Alexa is effective immediately and across all Alexa-enabled devices.

Similar to Google Home, which got voice recognition capability in April, now Alexa can also be used to set up multiple user accounts. Now the Echo, Echo Dot, and Echo Show can be tuned to offer personalized responses to every member in the house. Though Alexa devices did have multiple accounts support previously, users were required to say “Alexa, switch accounts” to change profiles.

After recognizing the voice, Alexa can deliver personalized results in the form of music playback, shopping, news briefings, messages and Alexa-to-Alexa calling. Further, each user with a voice profile and on a Music Unlimited Family Plan, just needs to say “play music” to trigger Alexa to play songs based on the speaker’s preferences.  Even for the command “play a station,” Amazon’s voice assistant will personalize results, notes ZDNet.

In addition, users who have set a voice confirmation code for shopping, now no longer have to say the code as Alexa already recognizes the voice linked to that account. Going ahead, the company will add more functionality to the feature.  Also, Amazon says the feature will “get smarter” as more people use it.

Such a feature was long-rumored to be in the works, and now will be available to all Alexa users by the end of the week. To activate the new feature, users need to go to the “Your Voice” section under settings, and then follow the instructions. According to the company, 10 given phrases have to be repeated for training the assistant to recognize a particular voice. For more information on the new feature, refer to Amazon’s help page.

“Once you set up the feature, Alexa will learn your voice (versus your spouse/partner/roommate’s voice) and be able to deliver a more personalized experience,” a company spokesperson told The Verge.

According to Amazon, the voice recognition feature will be available across the entire lineup of Echo devices, and the third-party Alexa devices as well. Since, Alexa will save the voice recognition details in the cloud, the same setting will automatically be available to all Alexa devices that you purchase in the future.

In separate news, Amazon, for the first time, dropped the price of the Echo Show since its launch in June. The screen-equipped Echo is now available for $199.99, compared to $229.99 earlier. Putting a device on sale is a normal business practice, but the timing of it raises questions.

Last week, a report from Variety claimed that the sales of Echo Show had dropped considerably after Google pulled YouTube support from Amazon’s device. It is believed that the rift between Google and Amazon may continue for a while, and thus, to boost the sale of the device in the meantime, Amazon has come up with a price cut. In addition, there are chances that with the price cut, Amazon is just trying to entice customers before the new range of Echo devices arrive at the time of the holidays.

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