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Amazon working on an Alexa update that may imitate dead people's voices!

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Black Mirror, who? The new Alexa feature will be able to synthesize short audio clips of a person's voice and then reprogram them as longer speech.
Amazon announced an Alexa update that may imitate dead people's voices!
File photo: Amazon Echo International Version

An AI feature to immortalize departed loved ones?

During the MARS conference, Amazon revealed that it's experimenting with a feature to replicate the speech of a dead individual based on less than a minute of recorded audio from the person.
The grandson is listening to a bedtime story that uses his dead grandma's voice Screenshot from the MARS conference
The grandson is listening to a bedtime story that uses his dead grandma's voice Screenshot from the MARS conference.

The company's Senior VP and Head Scientist Rohit Prasad demonstrated it through a short clip wherein the voice of a deceased loved one or the grandmother is used to read a grandson's bedtime story.

Prasad further explained that Amazon can deliver this kind of audio output with just a minute of speech. He added that they devised this technology by framing the problem as a voice conversion task and not a speech generation path.

The head scientist also said that how AI having human qualities is essential "in these times of the ongoing pandemic when so many of us have lost someone we love." He emphasized,

While AI can't eliminate that pain of loss, it can definitely make their memories last.

Many netizens online have thought that the new concept is creepy, reminding them of the dark sci-fi series Black Mirror on Netflix; specifically the episode "Be Right Back." This is the first episode of the show's second season, and it aired back in 2013.

The story revolves around the main character Martha (Hayley Atwell), who is mourning the loss of her boyfriend Ash (Domhnall Gleeson), who died in a car crash discovered. She discovered an AI technology service that can imitate Ash, with whom she can communicate.

However, the AI which uses Ash's past communications and social media profiles to recreate him can only reconstruct parts of his personality.

Amazon hasn't disclosed much information regarding this feature except for the said video demo. In the past, the company tried making Alexa mimic historical celebrity voices like actor Samuel L. Jackson, NBA star Shaquille O'Neal, and comedian Melissa McCarthy.

There's no word yet when will Alexa roll out the feature for public use, so we have to wait for further announcements. 

What do you think?

Source: Gizmodo

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