At Amazon’s Re: Mars conference, Alexa senior vice president Rohit Prasad showed off an amazing new voice assistant capability: the supposed ability to mimic voices. So far, there is no timeline on when or if this feature will be released to the public.
Even stranger, Amazon framed this ability to copy as a way to commemorate lost loved ones. He played a demonstration video in which Alexa read to a child with the voice of her recently deceased grandmother. Prasad stressed that the company was looking for ways to make AI as personal as possible. “While AI can’t eliminate the pain of loss,” he said, “it can definitely make memories last.” ‘having been trained in just one minute of audio of the individual who is supposed to play.
Security experts have long been concerned that deep false audio tools, which use text-to-speech technology to create synthetic voices, would pave the way for a lot of new scams. Voice cloning software has allowed for a number of crimes, such as a 2020 incident in the UAE where scammers tricked a bank manager into transferring $ 35 million after posing as a business director. But deep fake audio offenses are still relatively unusual and the tools available to scammers are, for the time being, relatively primitive.
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