AMAZON is scrapping its celebrity voices for Alexa, with users waving goodbye to the iconic sound of Samuel L. Jackson first.
Shaquille O’Neal, and Melisssa McCarthy will also disappear from Alexa devices, with Amazon already blocking the ability to purchase them.
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While the voice of Jackson will stop working on Alexa devices as soon as June 7, according to The Verge, others will be around for a little longer.
McCarthy and Shaq’s voices continue to be available until September 30th of this year.
“After three years, we’re winding down celebrity voices,” Amazon spokesperson Eric Sveum told The Verge.
“Customers will be able to continue using these voices for a limited time, and can contact our customer service team for a refund.”
The voices were fairly cheap, and began at a price of $0.99 at launch before moving up to $4.99.
Customers worldwide are eligible for refunds.
But you will have to request a refund for the voices yourself if you want to be reimbursed.
It’s unclear why Amazon has pulled the feature from Alexa devices.
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Customers enjoyed having a familiar, human voice in the home as opposed to the robotic timbre of Alexa.
The celebrity voiceovers used Amazon’s neural text-to-speech model to generate cheeky – and sometimes explicit – responses rather than rely on pre-recorded ones.
The company is reportedly considering using Alexa as a foundation for its own large language model (LLM) to rival ChatGPT, according to a recent report by Insider.
However, the Alexa division inside Amazon has been struggling to rein in operating losses which have exceed $5million in recent years, The Wall Street Journal revealed in November.
The company also announced layoffs affecting 18,000 employees earlier this year, with around 2,000 of those cuts affecting the hardware division which oversees Alexa and Echo products, according to CNBC.
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