Since late 2019, for the price of a Royale with cheese (or thereabouts), you could pick up Samuel L Jackson's voice as a personality for Alexa, Amazon's digital assistant on Echo devices. That's not the case anymore, though. The company has quietly pulled the ability to purchase Alexa skills for all three of its celebrity personalities: Jackson, Shaquille O'Neal, and Melissa McCarthy.
The listings for each one remain intact, but updates to each skill's description note that customers who have purchased the personalities will only be able to use them until 30 September. In the case of Jackson, users already lost his voice as of 30 April. The company notified Jackson fans in December that it would be pulling the voice and has started sending messages to those who have O'Neal's and McCarthy's voices.
How to get a refund on your Alexa celebrity voice
If you picked up any of the Alexa celebrity voices, you might have paid 99 cents during their early availability or $4.99 afterward. Now that they're discontinued, Amazon has said it will process refunds for those voices upon request. A spokesperson for Amazon tells Pocket-lint in a statement:
After three years, we’re winding down celebrity voices. Customers will be able to continue using these voices for a limited time, and can contact our customer service team for a refund.
Amazon is also apparently extending its grace period for using Jackson's voice from the listed 30 April until 7 June.
Quickest refund method: Contact Amazon customer service via live chat
- Visit the Amazon Customer Service support hub.
- Sign in to your Amazon account.
- Scroll down and select "Something else" under the "Here are some other things we can help with" section.
- Click "I need more help" to launch the customer service chatbot screen.
- Ask the customer service agent for help processing a refund on your Alexa celebrity voice you previously purchased.
So, what's going on with Alexa?
It's worth noting The Wall Street Journal previously reported that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had ordered a cost-cutting review at the company's devices unit, noting it was losing $5 billion a year. Some of those cuts came in the form of layoffs, with 27,000 employees coming off payroll since this past November. A fair number of them were out of hardware and a subset of those worked on Alexa.
In the lead-up to introducing Alexa and the original Echo speaker in 2015, Amazon has been investing in creating voice interfaces that average folk could utilize to do anything from controlling their smart home appliances to making repeat purchases of paper towels. Alexa conversations had the potential to augment revenues in Amazon's main business as an online retailer, but they weren't practical for most users. The same thing went for the ill-fated Dash Buttons where users could press them to re-order cereal, detergent, and other household products.
Read: Best Echo: Which Amazon Alexa device is right for you?
The company has also wielded its corporate heft and resulting scales of economy to push its Echo speakers, Echo displays, Kindle e-readers, Fire tablets, Fire TVs, and myriad other products to promote widespread adoption or in an attempt to wedge a competitive position in a new vertical such as Luna for cloud gaming.
Of course, all of those efforts do have their costs and it's become clear to Amazon that the company needs to be recouping on its investments and, perhaps, making splashy moves like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google to incorporate generative artificial intelligence into its products.