Alexa Speaking Styles and Emotions Now Available in Additional Languages

Last year, we introduced Alexa speaking styles and emotions. Speaking styles enable you to tailor Alexa’s voice to the respective content being delivered such as news, music, conversations, and long-form content. Alexa emotions allow you to have Alexa respond with either a happy/excited or a disappointed/empathetic tone. Today, we are excited to extend these capabilities to additional languages. 

• Music speaking style: now available in Canadian English, British English, and German.
• Conversational speaking style: now available in US English, Japanese, and Italian.
• Emotions: now available in British English and Japanese.

To learn more, check out our technical documentation here.

Starting today, you can use the music speaking style to emulate DJs or radio hosts. 

To implement the music speaking style, you can use the syntax below: 

<speak>
<amazon:domain name="music">Sweet Child O’ Mine by Guns N’ Roses became one of their most successful singles, topping the Billboard Hot 100 in 1988. Slash’s guitar solo on this song was ranked the 37th greatest solo of all time. Here’s Sweet Child O’ Mine.
</amazon:domain>
</speak>

The conversational speaking style enables Alexa to sound less formal, as if speaking to friends and family.

To implement the conversational speaking style, you can use the syntax below: 

<speak>
<amazon:domain name=“conversational”>I really didn’t know how this morning was going to start. And if I had known, I think I might have just stayed in bed.</amazon:domain>
</speak>

With emotions, you can have Alexa respond in a happy/excited tone when a customer answers a trivia question correctly or wins a game. Similarly, you can have Alexa respond in a disappointed/empathic tone when the weather forecast is gloomy. To get started with emotions, wrap Alexa’s response with the appropriate SSML emotion tag (‘excited’ or ‘disappointed’) and the level of intensity to be applied to the response (‘low’, ‘medium’ or ‘high’).

<speak>
<amazon:emotion name="excited" intensity="medium">Christina wins this round!</amazon:emotion>
</speak>

or

<speak>
<amazon:emotion name="disappointed" intensity="high">Here I am with a brain the size of a planet and they ask me to pick up a piece of paper.</amazon:emotion>
</speak>

We look forward to seeing what you build. Please ask questions and share your feedback on the Alexa developer forum. And feel free to connect with the Alexa Text-to-Speech Product Manager, Nikhil, on linkedin.