Is Alexa reciting Shakespeare in any way acceptable?
Amazon
Shakespeare’s birthday is April 23, and he’d have been 457 this year. To celebrate World Shakespeare Day, Amazon has introduced Bard-related elements to the Amazon Echo.
Regular readers will know I also work as an actor so I really shuddered at the thought of how this would turn out. Of course, we all talk Shakespearean regularly, when we say “fair play”, “for goodness sake” or any of the hundreds of phrases the playwright coined which have stayed with us.
But now, Amazon had taught Alexa to speak like Shakespeare. In fact, if you say, “Alexa, speak like Shakespeare”, the Echo speaker will respond with a series of choice quotes. These are spoken with very little conviction, tolerable to listen to, with only occasionaly mis-stressed emphasis, but nothing more. At least…