In Her Feelings: Amazon Will Be Making Its Alexa Voice Assistant More “Emotional”

Amazon Introducing Tools To Allow Alexa To Respond With Emotion

Source: Andrew Matthews – PA Images / Getty

Alexa, the voice assistant that lives inside your Amazon smart speaker you just purchased on Black Friday, will be getting a tad bit more “emotional.”

On Wednesday (Nov.27), the company announced it would be introducing new tools that would allow developers to add new skills that will enable Alexa to display emotions like excitement or disappointment. Amazon’s popular voice assistant will be able to respond in high, medium, or low degrees of the two emotions.

Now, as to why Amazon has decided to introduce this skill to Alexa, the company claims that “customer feedback indicates that overall satisfaction with the voice experience increased by 30% when Alexa responded by emotions.” The tech giant says the emotion skill could be used for games, for example, when Alexa has to respond to a correct or incorrect answer.

Speaking with CNBC, an Amazon spokesperson added:

“We’re continuing to introduce Alexa capabilities that will help create a more natural and intuitive experience for our customers. For example, customers will begin to notice an improvement when asking for sports updates depending on their sports team affinity, results of a recent game, and additional contextual signals. Alexa will deliver the update in an enthusiastic, upbeat voice if their team has won the recent game or just clinched a position in the play-offs.”

Quite impressive and interesting at the same time. You can hear Alexa in her feelings in the two videos below. Let us know how you feel about Amazon introducing emotions to the voice assistant.