Journalist Brad Stone says Nina Rolle is the original voice of Alexa. | Image: Nina Rolle
Amazon’s Alexa has a voice familiar to millions: calm, warm, and measured. But like most synthetic speech, its tones have a human origin. There was someone whose voice had to be recorded, analyzed, and algorithmically reproduced to create Alexa as we know it now. Amazon has never revealed who this “original Alexa” is, but journalist Brad Stone says he tracked her down, and she is Nina Rolle, a voiceover artist based in Boulder, Colorado.
The claim comes from Stone’s upcoming book on the tech giant, Amazon Unbound, an excerpt of which is published here in Wired. Neither Amazon nor Rolle confirmed or denied Stone’s guess, which he says is based on conversations with the professional voiceover community, but Rolle’s voice alone makes for a…
