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Amazon's Alexa Now Sounds More Human

Amazon has just announced that its intelligent personal assistant Alexa supports new Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) that will make it sound more human. 
The addition of a new set of speaking skills allows Alexa to control the tone,
timing, and emotion of its voice.
That means it can whisper, take a breath to pause for emphasis, adjust the rate, pitch and volume of her speech, and more.
As part of the coding process for new skills, five new tags have been added:
  • Whispering - which is an effect that can make anything Alexa says sound like a whisper.
  • Expletive beeps - which will bleep out words to make content suitable for all ages.
  • Sub - allows you to annotate phrases into abbreviated text - it makes more sense from a programmer's point of view
  • Emphasis - you can tag a phrase to be more emphasized or reduce emphasis.
  • Prosody - lets you adjust the rate, pitch, and volume of the spoken phrase.
The company will host a webinar on May 18, which is probably when we'll know more about the new language markups.

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