Amazon’s Alexa will be able to resurrect the voices of dead relatives, allowing users to feel like they’re talking to the lost beyond the grave.
The company revealed that it was working on a technology that would allow its voice assistant to impersonate people with a voice recording of someone less than a minute long.
It showed the function that allowed the synthetic voice of a deceased grandmother to read to her grandson. In a video showing the technology, a boy asked “Alexa, can Grandma finish reading me the Wizard of Oz?”.
The smart speaker recognized the request with its computer-generated synthetic voice before switching to a replica of Grandma’s voice.
Amazon did not say when it expects to launch the feature or whether it plans to restrict its use.
Improvements in voice recognition have allowed companies to create increasingly real digital voices, creating concern that technology could be used to impersonate public figures or to scam people.
“While AI can’t eliminate the pain of loss, it can definitely make memories last,” said Rohit Prasad, Alexa’s chief scientist at the Amazon Re: Mars conference, where the technology. He added that “many of us have lost someone we love” during the pandemic.
Voices could be generated with less than a minute of audio, Prasad said, compared to the hours of recording in a studio that was previously required.
Prasad said Amazon was also looking for Alexa’s assistant to be more real so she could show “human common sense” and “human-like empathy.”
Last year, Microsoft patented a chatbot that could mimic a “past or present entity … like a friend, a family member, an acquaintance, a celebrity, a fictional character, a historical figure.” Microsoft said this week that replicating people’s voices would require strict controls and revelations.
People have previously uploaded text message logs of dead relatives to chatbot programs, allowing them to chat with artificial intelligence imitations of lost loved ones.
One person who recreated his promise using chatbot software, after his death from a rare liver disease, said the technology had helped him find closure and reopened the old wounds, with ” more of the former than the latter “.
The technology is likely to cause fears that it could be used to impersonate living people, which could be used to bypass security systems. Several banks use voice recognition as an alternative to telephone banking passwords.
In 2019, a manager of a British energy company lost almost £ 200,000 after scammers used artificial intelligence to falsify his boss’s voice and ordered him to transfer the company’s funds to a foreign bank account. .
More than half of UK households have a smart speaker, according to Ofcom, and most have an Amazon Echo speaker.