Amazon plans to make Alexa mimic your voice; Alexa mimicking the voice of a deceased family member

Amazon.com needs to allow clients the opportunity to make Alexa, the company’s voice assistant, sound very much like their grandma – or any other person. Amazon is contriving a way for clients to speak to their relatives through its Alexa voice assistant, even after they’ve passed on.

At Amazon’s Re: Mars conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, Rohit Prasad, senior vice president and head scientist for the Alexa team, described a feature that permits the voice assistant to duplicate a particular human voice.

In a demonstration video, a youngster said, “Alexa, can Grandma finish reading me the Wizard of Oz?”

The online retailer is creating a system to allow Alexa to mimic any voice in the wake of hearing under a minute of audio, said Rohit Prasad, an Amazon senior vice president, at a conference the company held in Las Vegas Wednesday. The objective is to “make the memories last” after “so many of us have lost someone we love” during the pandemic, Prasad said.

Alexa affirmed the demand with the default, robotic voice, then, immediately switched to a softer, more humanlike tone, apparently mimicking the kid’s relative.

The Alexa team created a model that permits its voice assistant to create a high-quality voice “less than a minute of recorded audio,” Prasad said.

The feature is presently being developed, Prasad said. Amazon didn’t say when the feature will carry out for the general population.

Amazon declined to share when it would carry out such a feature.

The work wades into an area of technology that has garnered nearest scrutiny for expected advantages and misuses. For example, Microsoft Corp as of late limited which businesses could utilize its software to parrot voices. The objective is to assist individuals with discourse impairments or different issues however some are concerned it could likewise be utilized to reproduce political deepfakes.

Amazon trusts the project will assist Alexa with becoming pervasive in customers’ lives. However, public consideration has previously moved somewhere else. At Alphabet Inc’s Google, an engineer made the highly contested claim that a company chatbot had progressed to sentience. Another Amazon executive said Tuesday that Alexa had 100 million clients globally, in accordance with formations the company has accommodated device sales since January 2019.

Prasad said Amazon’s aim for Alexa is”generalizable intelligence,” or the ability to adapt to user environments and learn new concepts with little external input. He said that goal is “not to be confused with the all-knowing, all-capable, uber artificial general intelligence,” or AGI, which Alphabet’s DeepMind unit and Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI are seeking.

Amazon conveyed its vision for companionship to Alexa at the conference. In a video segment, it depicted a kid who inquired, “Alexa, can grandma finish reading me the Wizard of Oz?”

After a second, Alexa insisted on the command and changed her voice. She talked soothingly, less robotically, apparently sounding like the individual’s grandma, in actuality.

The e-commerce goliath needs to make chatting with Alexa more normal as a general and has carried out a series of features that empower its voice assistant to imitate more human-like dialogue, even with the end result of asking client questions.