Amazon has unveiled an experimental feature of Alexa that allows the AI assistant to mimic the voices of users’ dead relatives.
The company demonstrated the role at its annual MARS conference, showing a video in which a child asks Alexa to read a bedtime story with the voice of her dead grandmother.
“As you can see in this experience, instead of Alexa’s voice reading the book, it’s the child’s grandmother’s voice,” said Rohit Prasad, Amazon’s chief scientist for Alexa AI. Prasad presented the clip saying that adding “human attributes” to AI systems was increasingly important “in these times of ongoing pandemic, when many of us have lost someone we love.”
“While AI can’t eliminate the pain of loss, it can definitely make your memories last,” Prasad said. You can see the demo below:
Amazon has given no indication as to whether this feature will ever be made public, but says its systems can learn to mimic someone’s voice from a single minute of recorded audio. In an age of abundant video and voice notes, this means that it is within the reach of the average consumer to clone the voices of loved ones, or anyone else who likes them.
While this specific app is already controversial, with social media users saying the feature is “creepy” and “monstrous,” this AI voice imitation has become increasingly common in recent years. years. These imitations are often referred to as “audio deepfakes” and are already commonly used in industries such as podcasting, film and television, and video games.
Audio deepfakes are already common in podcasts and movies
Many audio recording suites, for example, offer users the option to clone individual voices from their recordings. That way, if a podcast host deletes their line, for example, a sound engineer can edit what they said by simply typing a new script. Smooth replicating speech lines takes a lot of work, but very small edits can be made with a few clicks.
The same technology has also been used in cinema. Last year, it was revealed that a documentary about the life of chef Anthony Bourdain, who died in 2018, used AI to clone his voice to read quotes from the emails he sent. Many fans were disgusted by the application of the technology, calling it “macabre” and “misleading.” Others advocated the use of technology as similar to other reconstructions used in documentaries.
Amazon’s Prasad said the feature could allow customers to have “lasting personal relationships” with the deceased, and it’s true that many people around the world are already using AI for this purpose. People have already created chatbots that mimic dead loved ones, for example, by training AI from stored conversations. Adding accurate voices to these systems, or even video avatars, is entirely possible using current AI technology, and is likely to spread further.
However, whether or not customers want their dead loved ones to become AI digital puppets is another entirely different matter.