Amazon Echo and Echo Plus behind illuminated Echo Button devices during the company’s Seattle event in September 2017. Image: Elaine Thompson / AP
Do you miss the sound of a dead relative’s voice?
Fear not: Amazon has introduced a new feature being developed for its virtual assistant Alexa, which can read aloud in the voice of a deceased loved one based on a brief facial recording.
“While AI can’t take that pain away from the loss, it can definitely make their memories last,” said Rohit Prasad, senior vice president and chief scientist for Alexa, at the Amazon re: MARS conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday.
In a video released at the event, Amazon Echo Dot was asked, “Alexa, can Grandma read me The Wizard of Oz?”
“All right,” Alexa’s voice replied.
“Instead of Alexa’s voice reading the book, it’s the child’s grandmother’s voice,” Prasad said. “We had to learn to produce high-quality voice with less than a minute of recording.”
He added: “We undoubtedly live in the golden age of AI, where our dreams and science fiction are becoming a reality.
Indeed, the feature immediately drew comparisons to fictional images of technology, but darker than what Prasad was likely to refer to, such as Black Mirror, the anti-utopian television series that includes an episode that incorporates comparable technology.
Reactions on Twitter ranged from “scary” to “painful” to “no,” as many online expressed concern about a feature that brings back the voice of the dead.
The feature is still under development and Amazon will not say when it will be released to the public, but its preview comes at a time when the cutting-edge capabilities of artificial intelligence are under close scrutiny.
In particular, the debate among researchers has intensified over what are known as profound fakes – video or audio that are visualized with AI to make it look as if someone has done or said something that has never happened.
It also comes shortly after a Google engineer sparked controversy over the claim that the company’s advanced chatbot communicates as if it were reasonable, a claim that lacks the support of the AI research community, but nonetheless underscores the software’s unusually human communication skills.
Large technology companies are increasingly studying the impact of AI on society. Microsoft recently announced that it restricts the use of software that mimics a person’s voice, saying the feature could be armed by those trying to impersonate speakers as an act of deception.
Subarao Kampampati, a professor of computer science at Arizona State University, said he hoped Amazon was showing a demonstration of the voice reproduction tool, prompting the public to be vigilant about the use of synthetic voices in everyday life.
“As scary as it sounds, it’s a good reminder that we can’t believe our own ears these days,” Kampampati said. “But the sooner we get used to this concept, which is still strange to us at the moment, the better we will be.”
Kampampati said Alexa’s function has the potential to help a deprived family member, although it needs to weigh the various moral issues that technology presents.
“For people who are grieving, it can actually help in the same way that we look back and watch videos of the dead,” he said. “But this comes with serious ethical issues, such as whether it is good to do so without the consent of the deceased.”
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