Amazon’s Alexa could soon mimic the voice of your dead loved ones
Global News
With less than a minute of recording, Amazon says that it can create a realistic sounding AI-generated voice that you can switch to on the Alexa voice assistant system.
Your Amazon Alexa may soon be able to replicate real, human voices — even those of your deceased loved ones.
The company announced the new feature at it annual Re:Mars conference, which is focuses on innovation in artificial intelligence (AI). The update to Alexa’s system would allow the virtual assistant to mimic the voice of any person based on less than a minute of recording.
To demonstrate, Amazon played a video at Wednesday’s event when a young boy asked “Alexa, can Grandma finish reading me the Wizard of Oz?”
Alexa then acknowledged the request, and switched to another voice mimicking the child’s grandmother. The voice assistant continued to read the book in that same voice.
Amazon began working on this feature as a way to put more “human attributes of empathy and affect,” into the Alexa system to build more trust in its users, according to Rohit Prasad, senior vice president and head scientist for Alexa.
“These attributes have become even more important during the ongoing pandemic when so many of us have lost ones that we love,” Prasad said. “While AI can’t eliminate that pain of loss, it can definitely make their memories last.”
Prasad says this feature differs from other generated voices the company has developed in the past because it had to be capable to creating a “high-quality voice” without hours of studio recording.
On the current Alexa system, users can switch to celebrity voices like Samuel L. Jackson and Melissa McCarthy as their voice assistant — created through a mixture of studio recordings and AI.
