Do you want Samuel L. Jackson to swear at you? Sure, we all do. And that’s exactly what Alexa users are getting more of in a new upgrade to the app that swaps out Alexa’s voice for the legendary Pulp Fiction actor.
After releasing the feature a year ago, Amazon quickly learned that when people downloaded Jackson to their device, they wanted to be cussed out by the actor on the regular. While the app offered the ability to turn off explicit phrases, over 74% of users not only left the profanity on, but overwhelmingly demanded more cussing from Marvel’s Nick Fury. On top of already responding, “What the hell do you even want me to say?” when users ask Jackson to speak them, the upgrade will reportedly add over 30,000 new phrases and five times the profanity. There’ll be no survivors. Via Variety:
As part of Jackson’s new repertoire on Alexa, if you ask “Hey Samuel, roast me” you will get responses including “Why the f— do you want to be roasted? You really think you can handle that?” and “I’m just gonna ignore that request, because if I really roast you, your sorry ass will be destroyed on impact.”
Damn, Samuel L. Jackson the App.
As for how Jackson has time to record so many phrases, this next part is either extremely interesting from a technological standpoint or absolutely terrifying if you think about the implications of teaching robots how to talk like Samuel L. Jackson:
Note that Jackson didn’t need to sit in recording studio to speak the thousands of new phrases for Alexa. His virtual voice is synthesized using Amazon’s Neural Text-to-Speech technology, which replicates speech patterns after being “trained” by a set of a person’s voice recordings.
There are worse ways for humanity to end.
(Via Variety)
