Samuel L Jackson lends voice to Amazon’s Alexa smart speaker

He’s one of the most prolific Hollywood stars going around, and soon you can bring him into your home.

He’s played hitmen, jedis and superheroes, but Samuel L Jackson’s newest role might be his most out-there yet.

The star performer, who has appeared in more than 100 films and is one of the highest-grossing actors of all time, has inked a deal with Amazon to lend his voice to the tech behemoth’s line of smart speakers powered by its AI voice assistant Alexa.

Jackson will be the first celebrity voice available for Alexa, with Amazon to add more next year.

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Users who choose to download the pack will be able to choose between a family-friendly mode without any swearing or an explicit version that allows Jackson fans to get the full motherf***ing experience.

Dave Limp, senior vice-president for Amazon devices and services, talks about new celebrity voices, including actor Samuel L Jackson, that will be made available on the tech company's Alexa devices.

The partnership comes off the back of Amazon’s newly developed Neural text-to-speech technology, aimed at making its default Alexa voice sound more like a real person, with more expressive and emotive speech patterns, including the ability to replicate inflections.

Jackson’s voice will be synthesised, rather than using prerecorded words and phrases, like similar Alexa celebrity guest appearances from stars like Chelsea Handler and Ed Sheeran have relied on in the past.

This saves Jackson the trouble of having to record repetitive words and phrases as well as saving listeners from hearing the same ones over and over again, but it does mean the voice on the Alexa speakers is more like a computer-generated impression of Jackson, albeit a high quality one.

The Samuel L. Jackson voice pack will be available later this year for the introductory price of 99 cents.

Amazon Alexa in the bathroom.

But the pack doesn’t contain full Alexa functionalities.

Amazon said its celebrity voice packs would be able to offer a variety of services but couldn’t help with Alexa features like shopping, making lists, setting reminders, and select other skills.

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Alexa users will also soon be able to enable automatic deletion of their spoken commands after three months after revelations the company had been storing recordings that were later analysed by thousands of staff.

The company said the recordings were only used to analyse and improve the performance of its speech recognition.

Similar practices were soon uncovered at Google, Microsoft and Apple, prompting privacy concerns among users.

What other stars would you like to hear on your smart speaker? Let us know in the comments below.

Originally published as Samuel L Jackson lends voice to Amazon’s Alexa smart speaker