Amazon has announced that it is introducing a new way for people to speak to their deceased family members through its Alexa voice assistant.
Per CNBC, at Amazon’s re: Mars conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday (June 22), Rohit Prasad, senior vice president and head scientist for the Alexa team, revealed new and impending features for the company’s smart assistant.
The one segment that certainly caused an impression was a feature that allows the digital voice assistant to replicate a specific human voice.
The senior vice presented a scenario in the event of the voice of a grandson asking Alexa: "Can grandma finish reading me the Wizard of Oz?" The voice assistant then played audio of the grandmother finishing her grandson's bedtime story.
Check out a demonstration of the tech below (starts at 1:02:39)According to TechCrunch, the Amazon team executed the audio output by referencing just one minute of an individual’s speech. The clip is then used to form longer audio that sounds nearly identical to the person’s voice.
"This required inventions where we had to learn to produce a high-quality voice with less than a minute of [the] recording versus hours of recording the studio," Prasad said during the conference. With this technology, it is conceivable that people will be able to play the voice of their deceased loved ones after they pass away.
This announcement has led to many people comparing the update to one of the most uncomfortable episodes of Black Mirror, 'Be Right Back' (S02E01).
In the episode, a grieving widow explores multiple forms of technology in order to once again live her life with an artificial version of her husband:
One Twitter user wrote: "Someone at Amazon watched the 'Be Right Back' episode of Black Mirror and thought, 'Yeah, that's a great idea!'"
While no timescale was given for the launch of the feature, Prasad added: "The way we made it happen is by framing the problem as a voice conversion task and not a speech generation path. We are unquestionably living in the golden era of AI, where our dreams and science."
The expansion of artificial intelligence that can convincingly replicate people’s voices has allowed it to become commonly utilized in the production of films and other content.
Per The Independent, in Tom Cruise's new film Top Gun: Maverick, actor Val Kilmer’s lines were read by an artificial intelligence system that could recreate his voice before it was affected by his cancer.
However, such technologies have also received complaints from the public, who have often called them creepy or deceptive.
For instance, due to criticism, Microsoft limited its access to voice-recreating tools amid worries that they could be used to produce deep fakes or other misleading audio.
Although Amazon's voice-mimicking feature may be unnerving to some, Prasad insisted that the feature was to "make the memories last," especially after "so many of us have lost someone we love" during the pandemic.
