Amazon announced this week that it's integrating new features into Alexa, which will allow developers of Skills to make it sound more expressive and human. This comes as another great development in the already expanding list of features which are fast included in home assistants.

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Alexa now has the feature which supports Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML), which enables engineers to control the tone, timing, and feeling of its voice. With this latest update to its system, Alexa will whisper, stress, and even bleep unseemly words if the user wants. As Amazon says, "These SSML features provide a more natural voice experience." 

Well, this new feature may take some time to be created. However, a more human sound could prompt a more pleasant user experience - making the whole interaction homely and delightful, and not just a robot speaking to a person. Cortana, in the past, sounded better than the robot-like Siri which talked in a rather robotic way. A human touch to the machine takes it to a new level, of course.

Human-sounding voices would most likely go far towards making Alexa as one of the customized, JARVIS-like machine, as it was being talked about at SXSW. 

But this isn't something that will be incorporated with Alexa. It's something that Skill designers can use. However, it won't be a surprise if the feature will come to general users too. If the feature works out well in the BETA, it will be welcome in a public release. So yes, Alexa users must really look forward to their device being more friendly.

With the new feature, it will be interesting to see if Alexa can take a greater market share in the voice assistant market. A human-like interaction will indeed make users more comfortable with using the machine.