Morgan Freeman may have one of the greatest voices of all time, but Samuel Jackson just landed the greatest voice gigs of all time.
According to CNA.com Jackson will become the first celebrity voice option for Amazon’s cloud-based digital assistant, Alexa.
Amazon brings Samuel Jackson's voice to Alexa to bolster use of virtual assistant https://t.co/ThugXlHWO5 pic.twitter.com/Nm4Kxxf7ky
— CNA (@ChannelNewsAsia) September 26, 2019
More celebrities are set to lend their voice as Amazon launches a range of new features designed to attract more users to the service.
The news, along with announcements of a new range of voice-controlled Echo speakers, a multilingual mode for Alexa and an additional privacy feature for deleting voice recordings regularly, underscores the investment the world’s largest online retailer is putting into voice-controlled computing, a new area of technology in which it is competing against Alphabet Inc’s Google Assistant and Apple Inc’s Siri.
Amazon’s celebrity voice feature will cost US$0.99 for those who purchase the device in 2019, after which it will cost $4.99, Senior Vice President David Limp said at an event in Seattle.
Jackson is the only celebrity voice Amazon has disclosed so far—there will be a clean and an explicit version.
Atlanta’s own Samuel Jackson has lended his voice to Amazon’s Alexa.
There will be a clean and explicit version. 🔥🔥pic.twitter.com/b7rGaqi5Zb
— Everything Georgia (@GAFollowers) September 25, 2019
Since Amazon announced its first Echo speaker in 2014, shoppers have purchased more than 100 million devices that come with Alexa, including microwaves, vacuum cleaners, and even cars.