On Wednesday, June 22nd, Amazon announced a brand-new feature for its AI assistant Alexa, which could bring your late relatives back and speak to you.
An article published by tech website Gizmodo.com also raised questions after the initial excitement towards Alexa’s new capability. After all, listening to the passed relative’s voice could affect one’s psychological state differently, and the dead people cannot give consent to using their voices.
Through its Alexa speech assistant, Amazon is developing a mechanism for people to communicate with their deceased family members. Rohit Prasad, senior vice president and lead scientist for the Alexa team, gave an overview of a technology that allows the voice assistant to mimic a particular human voice on Wednesday at Amazon's Mars conference in Las Vegas. "Alexa, can Grandma finish reading me The Wizard of Oz?" a youngster asked in a demonstration video. After confirming the request in her standard, robotic voice, Alexa abruptly changed to a softer, more human-like tone that seemed to imitate the child's relative. With "less than a minute of recorded audio," the Alexa team created a model that enables its voice assistant to deliver a high-quality voice, according to Prasad. Amazon did not specify a release date for the functionality. Prasad stated that it may be used to assist honor a dead family member, even if it could potentially be used to imitate any voice. Given that "so many of us have lost someone we love" due to the COVID-19 epidemic, Prasad added, making artificial intelligence conversative and companion-like has become a major goal. While AI can't take away the grief of loss, it can make memories linger, he continued. The e-commerce behemoth aims to make speaking with Alexa more natural overall, so it has released a number of features that let its voice assistant mimic more human-like conversation, even to the extent of posing questions to the user.