Sir Mix-A-Lot Creating Music Using Amazon Echo’s Alexa AI
Famous Seattle rapper Sir Mix-A-Lot revealed at a Black Music Summit in his hometown that he’s been working with Amazon to use their Alexa AI to assist music making.
The hip-hop veteran has a long history in music but what you might not know is the rapper/producer is also technologically minded. Mix-A-Lot said he thought he was an engineer after fixing a walkie talkie that he broke, saying: “Prior to rap music being born, I was into technology. My first sort of run in with it was when my mom bought me a set of walkie-talkies.”
Now the rapper is teaming up his technological passion with that of Amazon, in particular their hands-free speaker Echo and it’s artificial intelligence/assistant Alexa. Within a few hours Sir Mix-A-Lot and the team were able to use Alexa to voice-command functions in his music production software. The team is made up of software developers Thomas Phillips, Michael Dorsey, and Sebastien Blissett. Phillip’s said the chance to work with Sir Mix-A-Lot was a “no-brainer”.
When the team met Mix-A-Lot and discussed ideas they were straight to work making his ideas a reality. Mix said: “It was incredible to watch a dream come true in a matter of hours as opposed to years.” Although Alexa won’t be able to take care of complicated controls it will be able to provide help with certain functions that streamline the production process, taking some of the difficulty out of the mixers hands.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqMtl2fZYo0?rel=0&w=640&h=360]
It’s currently unclear whether this is a one-off project or if Amazon plan to implement it more broadly, but for the meantime you can see Sir Mix-A-Lot getting down with the Echo in the video above.