Bengaluru: Bringing Amitabh Bachchan’s voice to Alexa involved two huge technological challenges for Amazon. The voice had to sound exactly like Bachchan’s, since it’s a voice that Indians recognise only too well. As Manoj Sindhwani, vice-president of Alexa Speech at Amazon, says, “My mom’s a big fan of Mr Bachchan. I was worried that if there was even a single flaw, I would not hear the end of it.”

This was further complicated, Sindhwani says, by the manner in which Bachchan speaks — it’s extremely rich, and he speaks with a lot of emotion, intonation. That’s hard for text-to-speech voice systems to perfect. The second big challenge was to use ‘Amit ji’ as the wake word. Wake word is the word you use to activate Alexa.

We’ll know how well Amazon solved these issues only when people start using ‘Amit ji’ on a large scale. Inside Amazon, they are delighted with what they have accomplished. Bachchan is only the fourth celebrity, and the first outside the US, to be part of the Alexa voice feature. The first celebrity voice used was that of American actor Samuel L Jackson, which was launched in December 2019.

The work with Bachchan involved tech teams in India, Poland, the UK and the US, and the actor recording his voice across many sessions, so that the artificial intelligence (AI) systems could then work on it.

Puneesh Kumar, country leader for Alexa in Amazon India, says — to the amusement of all at the company — a sound engineer in Poland is on a first-name basis with Bachchan, given all the interactions they had.