Alexa has been a revolutionary technology that brought speech recognition technology right in your drawing room. It enabled people to order their smart assistants powered with Alexa to carry out a number of functions for them. For example, you can ask it search and play a particular song, and it does do the job with finesse. The advent of Alexa on the horizon promises great changes ahead. Most of the home automation solutions can be connected to an Alexa device and can be controlled through it. Since it accepts your voice as a computer command, you get most of the things done just by asking your smart assistant. However, more changes are in the offing. At the moment, Amazon Alexa offers the option to change its voice and name. In this article, we will learn how to do it in a step-by-step manner.
How to Change Alexa’s Name and Voice
Amazon Alexa
Amazon, the largest online retailer in the world, offers an intelligent voice recognition service called ‘Alexa Voice Service’ that makes it possible to voice-enable any internet-connected device that has a speaker and microphone. While Amazon would like to keep the official name of service as Alexa, it allows its customers to change the name either to ‘Amazon’ or ‘Echo’. Amazon also offers a device called ‘Echo’ that uses speech recognition and performs an ever-growing number of tasks. The brain of this device is called Amazon Alexa.
It’s the age when the smart assistant has arrived and is making our lives easier in ways that we never imagined before. Yet, we can’t dispel the overwhelming notion that we are becoming more and more of a robot ourselves. This is not to say that smart assistants are commanding us to unchartered territory. We mean, we are forced to a situation when we are giving the same command time and again and getting the same response every time. This can turn out to be monotonous and somewhat a robotic exercise for we mortals.
In this context, we must thank Amazon for allowing us to bring in some changes in its smart personal assistant Alexa. It allows you to change the name and change the voice of Alexa.
How to Change Alexa’s Name and Voice
Amazon Alexa, the smart personal assistant, has been around for almost five years now. During this period, this high-tech gadget has been obeying our commands and doing odd jobs with great efficiency. In particular, it has been awesome in answering our questions, dimming the light or drawing the curtain, and playing out music on request. But hearing your smart personal assistant in his typical voice and calling out him by just one name every time may make your interaction with your smart personal assistant monotonous and boring. In this light, it is great of Amazon that it has understood the feelings of Alexa users and has allowed changing voice and change the name of the Alexa smart personal assistant device.
Now, the days of smart personal assistant speaking in the same mechanical language are over. Also, it would respond to your call even if you call it by another name, there are not many options though. Now you can change the name and change voice of Alexa personal assistant. The great thing is that the process of bringing these changes is very easy. You can easily change the default setting and program new voice and name for your smart assistant.
Here is how you can customize your Amazon Alexa device:
Changing Alexa’s Name
Now you can change the name of Amazon Alexa device and this is a significant step forward towards personalization and variation of this intelligent smart assistant that works on speech recognition and cloud computing technologies. However, there are not many options as far as the wake word is concerned. It is still not possible to give your smart assistant just any other name that catches your fancy. The Amazon Alexa device just can’t have a fanciful name from WWF, Hollywood, sports or politics. You can choose to give your device a new wake word among the following three options: Amazon, Echo, and Computer.
To change the name of your smart assistant, you need to follow the steps given below in the same order:
- Open the Amazon Alexa app
- Open the three-line horizontal menu on the top-left corner
- Open the Settings and select device settings
- Scroll down and open the Wake Word
- Tap, and you will get a drop-down menu with three options to choose from Amazon, Echo, and Computer.
- Choose a new name for your smart assistant from the three names given
- Once you click okay on a wake word, Alexa’s rim light will turn orange
- After a few minutes, the light will go off
- You have successfully changed your Alexa’s name and now you have a new wake word
Changing Alexa’s Voice
Hearing your smart assistant in the same accent and intonation every time may make you feel a little robotic about your device. Now you can spice up your Alexa device’s voice and accent. You can choose a British accent if you are enough done with the US accent. Or, you can choose a passionate French accent and allow your device to show how versatile it can be. But this is not all! You can choose any other accent. However, it will still remain a female voice.
You can change the default language setting to include the accent that you want your device to speak. Here are the steps you need to follow:
- Open the Amazon Alexa app
- Tap the settings menu
- Scroll down to list of devices on your Alexa app and choose the device whose language or accent you want to change
- Now, move to the language setting
- You will get a drop-down menu with a list of languages and accents
- Make the changes and save it
This may sound very exciting but you need to exercise some cautions too, as you go about changing the language and accent of your Alexa device. The point to note here is: if your accent is American and you have chosen your device to speak and understand British accent, it may not be able to understand your American English. Some part of what you say may get lost in the way Alxea would understand you. If you have set the language and accent as British English, you must be able to speak a flawless Queen’s English for your Alexa device to understand your message in all its nuances. Apart from this, there is nothing to hold you back.
Before we conclude, we would like to tell you that you can do more with your Alexa device. Among the variations that smart assistant can offer includes enabling the device with new skills such as having it speak the language of your favorite celebrity.
Enabling Voice Skills
The Alexa Skills offer the possibility of the device speaking in the manner and style of a famous celebrity.
While the celebrity’s voice will not completely replace Alexa’s voice, it will still speak many of the frequently used phrases by the celebrity, often reminding you where your smart assistant is taking its inspirations from.
Here is a step-by-step guide to enable celebrity skills:
- Open the Amazon Alexa app
- Tap the three-line menu on the top-left corner
- Choose the Skill in the menu
- Type the name of the celebrity in the search bar and select the one that you want for your Alexa device
- Now your device is ready to wow you with your celebrity’s catchphrases
An interesting this here is that Alexa device can automatically enable the skill that you want it to have by simply asking for it. But you must convey it correctly to your device to carry out the task.
Final Thoughts
One of the key objectives of the developers at Amazon is to equip the smart assistant with features that make it sound more human. And, they are putting to use a great deal of hard work and resources to achieve this objective.
In this context, one of the most promising developments has been the Speech Synthesis & Markup Language or ‘SSML’.
With the SSML, you can switch up and introduce variation in the way Alexa makes her speech. The features include the ability to change the speed, pitch, and intonations of her speech. You can switch down the voice to a whisper. If you have children in your family or you don’t like strong language in general, SSML provides you with the option to bleep out or change any strong language.
It is an exciting moment for Alexa fans as many more improvements are on the horizon and Alexa devices are being geared to offer more customizable user experience in the days to come.
However, for the moment, you can change name and change voice of your Alexa device and enjoy the change that your smart assistant now boasts. This allows you to break the monotony of hearing your smart assistant blurting out sentences and speeches that sound more mechanical than human. But after five years in service, people’s expectations from this smart device have grown in phenomenal proportions. And, that sets Alexa on a very exciting journey.
