Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should
Nowadays, virtual assistants like Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa are with us wherever we go, even if that can sometimes feel a little creepy. It looks like Amazon is trying to take things to another level, as the company took the stage this week to boast about Alexa’s newfound ability to mimic the voice of dead people.
During Amazon’s re:Mars conference in Las Vegas (via Android Authority), the company showed off a feature that allows the assistant to quickly learn the voice of someone from a voice recording of less than a minute before mimicking it. The intended use case is to allow people to hear the voices of deceased relatives once more. A video showcased during the keynote shows a kid asking Alexa if their grandmother can finish reading The Wizard of Oz, prompting Alexa to start talking in the voice of the kid’s grandmother.
Some people certainly find solace and comfort in listening to the voice of a dead relative they miss dearly, specifically through the use of video recordings or other archived material on hand. It’s definitely not the same thing as an AI reconstruction of their voice based on a short voice recording, which could instead come off as, at best, slightly disturbing, and, depending on the person, possibly emotionally manipulative or devastating.
It doesn’t look like this will make its way to Amazon’s voice assistant anytime soon, as the company didn’t talk about any specific release timeline. It’s possible that it just wanted to flex its AI muscles in front of Google and other competitors in the space. If that was the objective, it’s undoubtedly one of the top “weird flex but OK” moments we’ve seen to date.
