Amazon is giving away Alexa celebrity voices and issuing no refunds

If you’ve been saving money to integrate Shaq’s voice into your Alexa devices, you’ve officially blown it. Amazon is giving away all of its products including Shaquille O’Neal and Melissa McCarthy, and they say it isn’t, Samuel L. Jackson. Premium voice options will not be available for purchase and will not work anymore even if you purchased a while ago,

Which brings us to the subject of refunds, and it appears there will be no refunds. This isn’t alarming news, as volume options launched for just $1 before moving to $5 in recent months. However, buying something and having it evaporate into nothing is never fun for consumers. We’ve reached out to Amazon for clarification on these refunds and will update when we receive a response.

Samuel L. Jackson has already flown the barn, with About the early retirement of his avatar voice. Melissa McCarthy and Shaq are still engaged, but only until September.

For starters, this feature was an addition of Alexa that turned her usual tunes into celebrity tunes. All of this was somewhat limited when compared to Alexa’s full feature set, as Celebs won’t do reminders and don’t integrate with many skills. However, they tell jokes, answer questions, and complete simple tasks with the help of voice. The service began with Jackson in 2019 but expanded to Shaq and McCarthy shortly thereafter.

So why did Amazon shut down the feature? Alexa is no longer the hottest thing in the universe and the company’s hardware division Participate in the design and manufacture of Echo speakers, so you can be a part of it. Again, the feature set with these sounds was on the anemic side, so perhaps not enough people bought them to make up for the licensing costs. Finally, there is an AI elephant in the room. Adopting its own large language model (LLM) like ChatGPT to radically transform Alexa, celebrity voices may not fit that vision.