Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge
Amazon has quietly started rolling out a new masculine-sounding voice option to its Alexa virtual assistant along with a similarly masculine-sounding wake word to trigger the assistant: “Ziggy.” (The odd choice of name is presumably to fit into Amazon’s love of “A to Z”-style branding.)
The new voice option was actually added several days ago alongside an announcement for new celebrity voices like Shaq and Melissa McCarthy, but it went largely unnoticed until it was spotted by The Ambient. You can hear a sample of the new voice option here.
A new voice for Amazon’s digital assistant
The “Ziggy” wake word joins the existing “Alexa,” “Computer,” “Echo,” and “Amazon” wake words that have already been available to use with Alexa for years….
