Amazon’s Alexa ad was the biggest winner of this year’s Super Bowl outside the greater Philadelphia area. The company spilled the beans early, but the spot still managed to drum up the biggest response of the night (outside of some very unfortunate choices from automakers). The silly 90-second commercial centered around some high profile celebrities filling in after Amazon’s smart assistant “lost her voice.”
How best to maintain a little of that $5 million/minute juice after the end of the big game? Audio company Ground Control enlisted Gordon Ramsay to lend his voice for an Alexa skill. Granted, it’s not quite the same as actually getting the celebrity chef turned commercial costar to fill in full-time, but it’s likely the start of a bigger trend for smart assistant skills moving forward.
Rather than filling you in on weather, traffic and the like, the Gordon Ramsay skill, “reviews” your cooking, utterly decimating and sense of accomplishment in the process. Once the skill is enabled, users can prompt Alexa to “ask Gordon Ramsay what he thinks about my food,” eliciting a Ramsayism like, “how can you do this to food and f***ing sleep at night.”
That, incidentally, is their censorship, not ours. While Amazon’s apparently psyched about the new skill, I suspect the company would be none too thrilled about their family friendly assistant dropping f-bombs, even if they’re from the mouth of a lovable television chef. The company has, after all, cracked down on questionable content.
“We worked closely with Amazon to ensure that Ramsay’s statements wouldn’t be construed as offensive to certain groups of people, and still maintain the spirit of his evocative style,” Ground Control CEO Mike Macadaan told TechCrunch. “In an unexpected twist, we have been inundated with requests to create an uncensored version that un-bleeps all of his expletives.”
But if you’d like to have an angry chef yell things at your food, you can download the skill now.