Amazon Alexa’s personal digital assistant is about to acquire a new ability – to reproduce the voices of family members, even if they are dead.
The opportunity was unveiled at an Amazon conference last week in Las Vegas. The feature is still under development, but will allow Alexa to mimic a specific person’s voice based on less than a minute of recorded recording.
Rohit Prasad, Alexa’s chief scientist, said the desire behind the ability was to build greater trust in people’s interactions with Alexa by investing more “human attributes of empathy and affect.”
Prasad said, “While AI [Artificial Intelligence] it can’t remove that pain from the loss, it can definitely make their memories last. ”
He then played a video of the event with a small child asking, “Alexa, can Grandma read me The Wizard of Oz?” Alexa then switches to an artificial voice that mimics the child’s grandmother.
Many critics call the move “scary.”
So Amazon’s latest Alexa feature can mimic the voice of a dead person … it’s just scary. Would anyone really use this?
– Steve Keating (@LeadToday) June 24, 2022
A software consultant named Fiona Charles tweeted, “Is there anyone who doesn’t think this is seriously scary?”
Mashable said Alexa’s use of the voices of dead loved ones was “like an episode of Black Mirror.” It’s a TV show that some compare to a modern version of the Twilight Zone, which merges science fiction with dystopian fears. Netflix describes it as “a distorted, high-tech near future in which humanity’s greatest innovations and darkest instincts collide.”
Other social media users said, “I hear dead people,” a mocking reference to a movie called The Sixth Sense.
Meanwhile, efforts to equip Alexa with the power to imitate the voices of specific people also raise concerns about confidentiality and ethical issues regarding consent.
All of this is part of the shift to artificial intelligence that several large technology companies are actively developing, raising fears that AI could invade real life with fake creations that distort our perceptions of reality.
“Undoubtedly we live in the golden age of AI, where our dreams and science fiction are becoming a reality,” Prasad added.
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