The ecommerce giant has only offered its feminine-sounding option since the Echo was first introduced back in 2013
Amazon has started rolling out a new masculine-sounding voice option to its Alexa virtual assistant along with “Ziggy” – a wake word to trigger the assistant.
The new voice option was actually added several days ago, but it went largely unnoticed until it was spotted by The Ambient.
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. Amazon isn’t specifically associating “Alexa” with the feminine-sounding voice and “Ziggy” with the new masculine-sounding option. Users can use either of the voice options with any of the wake words.
You can switch between the two voice options — which Amazon refers to as “Original” and “New” — by asking Alexa to “Change your voice,” and you can ask it to “Change your wake word” and select a new wake word. Though, the change appears to be device-specific, so you’ll have to set the new voice on each of your Alexa devices.
Amazon has been a holdout when it comes to offering a masculine-sounding voice option for its digital assistant; Apple and Google offer multiple voice options for Siri and Google Assistant, respectively. Neither of them associates specific voices with gender anymore, either as Apple’s Siri options are presented as Voice 1 and Voice 2, while Google’s voice options come under a variety of colors.
Amazon has only offered its feminine-sounding option since the Echo was first introduced back in 2013. And while The New York Times notes that Alexa will respond to questions about gender by replying “I’m not a woman or a man, I’m an AI,” Amazon itself still refers to the Alexa personality using “she” and “her” in its documentation.
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