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by saghm 1516 days ago
The local classic rock radio station in Boston used to have Alice Cooper hosting a certain night each week (I think Friday or Saturday, and presumably pre-recorded and remotely. Maybe he still does it? I haven't lived there for a while now). He was pretty funny! I'd honestly love to have a voice assistant that sounds like him; maybe the way to deal with both the question about what gender the assistant's voice should be and not having to worry about having generated pronunciations sound natural is just to pay some celebrity a bunch of money (and/or some royalties for the assistant) to spend a month in a studio recording a huge amount of stuff with varied pitch and tone and vocabulary and then that to splice together the assistant's responses. Bonus is bringing them back after a year or so to record more stuff to smooth over any rough edges that are found!
1 comments
philipp2310 1516 days ago
I always wondered if Alice Cooper is doing that for multiple radio stations :) A local German radio station (Radio Bob) has a weekly show with him as well. I guess the same prerecorded stuff with a few custom "you are listening to..." mixed in!

Regarding "just to pay some celebrity".. well, that is currently way out of our budget, as everything offered so far is 100% free and there are no plans to change that :)

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saghm 1515 days ago
> I always wondered if Alice Cooper is doing that for multiple radio stations :) A local German radio station (Radio Bob) has a weekly show with him as well. I guess the same prerecorded stuff with a few custom "you are listening to..." mixed in!

That's super cool! It's probably all the same across the stations, yeah, although it still is quite fun to hear the songs he picks and why. One of the things he would always do was have a pair of songs that shared some theme that he would share afterwards, and it was fun to try to guess. The only two I remember offhand were some song called "Jack the Ripper" and then "Midnight Rambler" by the Rolling Stones with the theme "about serial killers", and then "God Gave Rock and Roll To You" by Argent along with "Since You Been Gone" by Rainbow, which were apparently written by the same guitarist.

> Regarding "just to pay some celebrity".. well, that is currently way out of our budget, as everything offered so far is 100% free and there are no plans to change that :)

Oh, definitely, I wasn't offering this as a completely serious suggestion so much as something that I could totally see one of the major tech companies doing to try to separate themself from the pack

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