Amitabh Bachchan becomes first Indian voice of Amazon’s Alexa

Indian cinema icon Amitabh Bachchan has become the first Indian celebrity to lend his voice to Amazon’s AI assistant Alexa. The US tech giant rolled out the new feature on Thursday.

Bachchan, who has appeared in more than 200 films, is a megastar not only in his homeland, but across Asia and the Middle East. Aged 78, he remains Bollywood’s biggest star.

He is renowned for his powerful, deep baritone — meaning Indians can generally recognize him with their eyes shut, making him a perfect choice to voice Alexa.

“Amit ji” can now be used as a wake word to invoke the Bollywood legend and hear him in either Hindi or English, Amazon announced.

“Building the Amitabh Bachchan celebrity voice experience with one of India’s most iconic voices has been a labor of love,” Puneesh Kumar, Alexa spokesperson for India, told Arab News in a statement.

“Creating the world’s first bilingual celebrity voice required us to invent and reinvent across almost every element of speech science — wake word, speech recognition, neural text-to-speech and more,” he continued. “We will continue to enrich this experience as science evolves.”

From Thursday, Indians can also add Bachchan’s voice to Amazon’s shopping app on Android devices.

Besides hearing the legendary actor’s voice when interacting with Alexa, users can also listen to content handpicked by Bachchan himself, including stories from his life, motivational quotes, tongue twisters, and a selection of poems by his father — celebrated Hindi poet Harivanshrai Bachchan.

The star said he is excited his wellwishers can now “interact” with him through the new medium.

“I am looking forward to hear how they feel about this,” Bachchan said in statement.