Hart and Al Lindsay, the first engineering manager on the project, visited them in Gdańsk on a trip they were taking through Europe to look for acquisition targets. By 2012, Ivona had expanded into 20 other languages and offered more than 40 voices. In 2006, Ivona began to enter and repeatedly win the annual Blizzard Challenge, a competition for the most natural computer voice, organized by Carnegie Mellon University. (Today “Jacek” remains one of the Polish voices offered by AWS’ Amazon Polly computer voice service.) The Ivona founders then had to renegotiate the actor’s contract after he angrily tried to withdraw his voice from the software.
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Pranksters manipulated the software to have him say inappropriate things and posted the clips online, where his children discovered them. Labijak subsequently began to hear himself everywhere, and regularly received phone calls in his own voice urging him, for example, to vote for a candidate in an upcoming election. Over the next few years, it was used widely in subways, elevators, and for robocall campaigns. The resulting product, which they called Spiker, quickly became the top-selling computer voice in Poland. The Ivona founders got an early glimpse of how powerful their technology could be when they paid a popular Polish actor named Jacek Labijak to record hours of speech to create a database of sounds. With a younger classmate, Michal Kaszczuk, he took recordings of an actor’s voice and selected fragments of words, called diphones, and then blended or “concatenated” them together in different combinations to approximate natural-sounding words and sentences that the actor might never have uttered. Osowski had the notion that so-called text-to-speech, or TTS, could read digital texts aloud in a natural voice and help the visually impaired in Poland. Ivona was founded in 2001 by Lukasz Osowski, a computer science student at the Gdańsk University of Technology. The search led to several rapid-fire acquisitions over the next two years, including the Polish startup Ivona. Alexa execs tried to learn which of the remaining startups were promising by asking prospective targets to voice-enable the Kindle digital book catalog, then studying their methods and results. It was a nontrivial challenge, since Nuance, the Boston-based speech giant whose technology Apple had licensed for Siri (and which was recently acquired by Microsoft), had grown over the years by gobbling up the top American speech companies. To speed up development, Hart and his crew went looking for startups to acquire. Amazon was trying to build a service capable of understanding language spoken from across a noisy room, using a relatively immature technology called far-field speech recognition. Siri’s users spoke commands directly into microphones. They were also attempting to pull off a much more technically complex feat. The Amazon team tried to reassure themselves that their product was unique, since it would be independent from smartphones. Hart and his team felt validated by the news that a resurgent Apple was also working on a voice-activated personal assistant, but they were discouraged by the fact that Siri was first to market and initially garnered some negative reviews. It was the last passion project of cofounder Steve Jobs, who died of cancer the next day. On October 4, 2011, just as the Alexa team was coming together, Apple introduced the Siri virtual assistant in the iPhone 4S. Unrealistically, Bezos wanted to release the device in six to 12 months. The initial Alexa crew worked with a feverish sense of urgency. If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission.
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