Alexa can now read your news like a newscaster

Alexa can now deliver the news with the tenor and tone of a professional newscaster, thanks to a new artificial intelligence (AI) technique. Starting today for customers in the U.S., as first spotted by TechCrunch, Alexa will brief you on the day's events and narrate snippets from Wikipedia with a "more natural," contextually sensitive voice that emphasizes words and phrases in a human-like way. To hear the new "newscaster" voice, try asking: "Alexa, what's the latest?" And to listen to the voice read a snippet from a Wikipedia article, say a command like: "Alexa, Wikipedia Nick Jonas." "Just the way humans vary their way of speaking based on the situation, our new … technology enables Alexa to deliver the day's news by adapting a different speaking style as compared to how she would sound when, for example, providing information from Wikipedia," Amazon wrote in a blog post published this morning.