Welcome to the Kotkeye Ride Home for Tuesday, May 11th, 2021. I'm Jackson Bird. A new book digs into the origins of Amazon's Alexa and allegedly reveals the woman who provided the voice for their original virtual assistant.

A teenage wannabe influencer from France is set to be Italy's next queen.

Didn't think Italy had royal leaders anymore? You're right, and someone should tell this

noble family that. And screw the free donuts and half-hearted store coupons we have as incentives in America,

Romania is offering vaccinations inside Dracula's Castle.

Here are some of the cool things from the news today.

So there's a new book out from Silicon Valley journalist Brad Stone called Amazon Unbound,

Jeff Bezos and the invention of a global empire.

And an excerpt printed today in Wired, which walks us through the origins of Amazon's Alexa,

casually includes one detail that is actually pretty massive, the identity of Alexa.

Also, apologies, if you were listening to this on a speaker near your device, I'm also going to

mention the Apple one, so maybe put your headphones in or listen on one and a half time to try

to trick your device or something. So one thing I found interesting right off the bat is that Bezos originally wanted different

voices associated with different types of tasks, so a different voice for listening to music

versus placing an order. Having over a dozen different voices, however, would be tricky,

especially at the outset of an already ambitious project.

Now, Amazon had already signed on a partnership with Polish company Ivona, which was an early leader in text-to-speech technology, with over 40 voices in 20 languages in 2012.

Now, Amazon needed to develop their own voice, and having made the decision to go with just one for now,

they made a list of priorities for the characteristics the voice should evoke, which include

quoting Stone in Wired, trustworthiness, empathy, and warmth, which they determined those traits

were more commonly associated with a female voice, end quote. And they also didn't want the

voice to have a regional accent. So they teamed up with a voiceover, end quote. And they also didn't want the voice to have a regional accent.

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