You Can No Longer Make Your Alexa Talk Like Samuel L. Jackson
For the past few years, Amazon Echo device owners have been able to integrate celebrity personalities into their Alexa digital assistant, but the service is being phased out by the company. Pretty soon you won’t be able to ask Samuel L. Jackson to put your kids to bed, tell Melissa McCarthy “Hey Melissa, tell me about the bridesmaids ” or get advice from Shaquille O’Neal anymore .
While you can no longer spend $5 to buy the service, if you’ve already purchased any star voices, you’ll be able to keep using them for a while: McCarthy and O’Neal’s personalities will be active until September; Samuel L. Jackson will pass away on June 7th. After that, you can also request a refund.
“After three years, we are winding down celebrity voices. Customers will be able to continue using these voices for a limited time and may contact our support team for a refund,” Amazon said in a statement.
How to Get a Refund for Your Amazon Celebrity Identity
As stated in the above statement, Amazon does not plan to automatically issue refunds to personal data buyers – this is a voluntary thing. To make sure you get your money back, contact Amazon Customer Service. You can use the website or call Amazon’s 24/7 customer service at 1 (888) 280-4331.
Why is Amazon ditching Alexa celebrity voices?
Amazon has given no reason for shutting down the service, but licensing celebrity voices and names can’t be cheap, and Amazon is in cost-cutting mode, having recently implemented large-scale employee layoffs . the team that works on Alexa (maybe destroy them with great vengeance and furious anger?).
While customer reviews of the voices are generally positive—the cumulative rating is 4 stars—there are nearly 100,000 reviews for the first voice, Sam Jackson, and only about 4,000 for Shaq, who was introduced later. This does not mean that it is an important or popular feature. Each celebrity had a limited set of queries they could answer instead of serving as your permanent personal assistant, so it was always more of a novelty than a killer app.
Amazon devices with Alexa (but without Shaquille O’Neal) run the gamut from the $279.98 Echo Show 15 smart display to the tiny $39.99 Echo Pop music player.
These are the favorite Alexa-enabled Amazon customer devices: