Alexa will be able to start talking to the voices of the dead, Amazon said.
The voice assistant will be able to channel dead people and speak as they would, the company said. The feature will arrive in an upcoming update.
Amazon noted that if Alexa spoke in this way, it would not “eliminate [the] pain of loss. But he said he hoped Alexa’s new voices would “make their memories lasting”, citing the pandemic and the fact that “so many of us have lost someone we love”.
The function requires only one minute of recorded audio to be fed into the system. Artificial intelligence can then use the recording to build an entire voice, Rohit Prasad, Amazon’s chief scientist for Alexa AI, said in a statement.
Amazon did not say when the feature will arrive to customers or said definitively that it will be released to the public at all. But in the message, the feature seems to work by directing the voice of a seemingly dead grandmother so she can read to a child.
In his message, he shows a child begging Alexa to make Grandma read me The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Alexa immediately recognized the command and changed her voice, adopted a soothing and less robotic voice, and read the book.
The development of artificial intelligence, which can convincingly recreate people’s voices, has allowed it to become widely used in the production of films and other content. In the new movie Top Gun: Maverick, for example, Val Kilmer’s lines were read by an artificial intelligence system that could recreate his voice before he was affected by his cancer.
But such technologies have also received considerable public criticism, often calling them scary or deceptive. In response to such concerns, for example, Microsoft has restricted access to such voice reproduction tools amid fears that they could be used to create deep fakes or other misleading audio.
Amazon’s new tool was met with similar fears – “Black Mirror” appeared on Twitter after the announcement, while people compared it to the dystopian science fiction series.
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