Amazon Alexa Will Soon Imitate Voices

Amazon is reportedly developing technology that will allow voice assistant Alexa to imitate someone’s voice after a minute of listening, so you can talk to a deceased loved one or even your favorite personality.

At Amazon’s Re:Mars conference, Alexa’s senior vice president, Rohit Prasad, presented a disturbing new feature for its voice assistant. Alexa will soon be able to imitate voices, including from deceased people. With this feature, Amazon claims to “make memories last” and is developing a system that allows its assistant to…imitate any voice after hearing less than 1 minute of audio Soon you can ask a deceased loved one to tell your stories, play music or just turn on the lights, all from your Alexa device.

You can also check out our roundup of the best voice commands to try on your Echo speaker. In its presentation, Amazon demonstrated the feature by using a deceased grandmother’s voice to read a bedtime story to a child.

Amazon teaches Alexa to imitate any voice

To create this feature, Amazon had to “learn how to produce a high-quality voice in less than a minute of recording, rather than several hours of studio recording,” says Rohit Prasad. “The way we have achieved this is by framing the problem as a speech conversion task and not as a path for speech generation.

We are without a doubt living the golden age of AI, where our dreams and science are,” added the If you find the idea of ​​using the voice of a deceased loved one too frightening, know that it will also be possible to use, for example, ask Alexa to imitate the voice of one of your favorite celebrities, or a TV presenter. As of now, Amazon hasn’t shared many details beyond this initial demonstration. In the meantime, keep in mind that Amazon recently announced other interesting features, such as the ability to raise the pitch if the ambient noise is too high.