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.

Amazon already gave Alexa the ability to whisper, and now it's rolling out another way to change the assistant's speaking style -- it's giving Alexa a "newscaster" voice. Starting today, when U.S. customers ask Alexa "what's the latest?" to hear the day's news, Alexa will respond using a voice that's similar to how a professional newscaster delivers news. The voice knows which words should be emphasized for a more realistic delivery of the news, explains Amazon. To achieve this new voice, Amazon took advantage of recent developments it made with Neural TTS technology, or NTTS. This technology delivers a more natural-sounding voice, and allows Alexa to adapt her speaking style based on the context of your request.

Alexa can now modulate its voice beyond whispering in hushed tones. Amazon has introduced a'newscaster' voice in the US that kicks in when Alexa reads the day's news or recites Wikipedia information. It's not going to replace the news anchor for your favorite media outlet, but the speaking style is more authoritative and doesn't sound quite so out-of-place as Alexa's standard voice. The trick, Amazon said, is the use of Neutral Text-To-Speech (NTTS) technology that relies on deep learning to create the speech signal. The AI-based system learns to both intonate more effectively and emphasize the right words in a sentence.

Amazon's Alexa continues to learn new party tricks, with the latest being a "newscaster style" speaking voice that will be launching on enabled devices in a few weeks' time. You can listen to samples of the speaking style below, and the results, well, they speak for themselves. The voice can't be mistaken for a human, but it does incorporate stresses into sentences in the same way you'd expect from a TV or radio newscaster. According to Amazon's own surveys, users prefer it to Alexa's regular speaking style when listening to articles (though getting news from smart speakers still has lots of other problems). Amazon says the new speaking style is enabled by the company's development of "neural text-to-speech" technology or NTTS.