Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant lets you ask supported speakers, tablets, or TV devices all sorts of questions… including personalized ones like “what’s on my schedule today?”
But if your household has more than one Alexa user, there’s been a limit to that personalization, because Alexa couldn’t tell one voice from another. Now it can.
Amazon is rolling out an update to Alexa that adds voice profiles, allowing you to train your Alexa devices to recognize different people’s voices.
Once you’ve done that by speaking 10 different sentences for Alexa to analyze, you can ask “Alexa, who am I?” to hear if it knows you from your spouse, kids, or roommates. After that, you can ask for appointments, add items to your shopping list, or make other requests or commands and know that Alexa will automatically figure out who’s talking and react accordingly.
If you ask Alexa to play your voice messages or send a message to a contact, you can also say things like “play my messages” or “send a message” without getting your messages mixed up with someone else’s. And if you have an Amazon Music Unlimited family plan, Alexa will select appropriate music for each user when you say things like “Alexa, play music.”
This is a feature that Google Home smart speakers with Google Assistant have supported since earlier this year, by the way.
What a world we live in where we can ask a small cylinder “who am I?” and actually expect a reasonable response.