Amazon announced a new capability for its digital assistant Alexa that will read aloud in the voice of a deceased loved one based on short audio of the individual. Here’s all you need to know about the new feature being added to Amazon’s Alexa.
Amazon’s Alexa is a virtual assist system primarily based on Ivona, a Polish speech synthesizer purchased by Amazon in 2013. Alexa can assist make your life smoother, more fulfilling, and more fun, whether at home or on the move. According to Reuters, Amazon is working on a technique that would allow Alexa to mimic human voices.
“While AI can’t eliminate that pain of loss, it can make their memories last,” claimed Rohit Prasad, executive vice president and lead scientist for Alexa, during Amazon’s re: MARS conference in Las Vegas on 22nd June 2022.
It showed a video of Alexa reading to a kid in the sound of his recently gone grandmother. Prasad emphasized that the corporation is looking for techniques to create AI as personalized as possible. According to a spokesperson of Amazon, the new skill can build an artificial voiceprint after being taught on as little as a few minutes of audio of the person it’s supposed to mimic.
Amazon has not publicly stated when the voice imitating capability would be available. While the demonstration did touch some people’s emotions, several skeptics are skeptical that the tool will be confined to only helping people find closure.
Massive technology corporations are rapidly studying Artificial Intelligence’s influence on society. Microsoft recently declared that it would prohibit software replicating a person’s voice, claiming that the capability might be used to deceive individuals attempting to impersonate speakers.
Security experts have long been concerned that deeply phony audio technologies, which utilize text-to-speech technology to generate synthetic voices, may open the door to a deluge of new scams. However, serious faux audio crime is somewhat unusual, and the instruments available to scammers are, thus far, relatively crude.
