Your Alexa Will Soon Be Able to Mimic Your Voice
The world is creeping closer and closer to Black Mirror every day and this upcoming Alexa feature proves it.
At its re:MARS conference on Wednesday (June 22), Amazon showed audiences its brand new Alexa technology.
Alexa will soon be able to mimic the voices of dead relatives using less than a minute of recorded audio.
"While AI can't eliminate that pain of loss, it can definitely make their memories last," Amazon’s Alexa AI senior vice president and head scientist Rohit Prasad said at the conference.
In a video demonstration shown onscreen at the conference, a boy says, "Alexa, can Grandma finish reading me The Wizard of Oz?," followed by Alexa reading the story in the grandmother's voice.
The new feature was presented as Prasad stood in front of a screen that read, "human-like empathy," in reference to Alexa and AI.
The announcement garnered mixed reactions from the internet.
"idk how i feel about this feature. it’s giving [nosy]," one person wrote.
Another tweeted, "I'm gonna change this to Miley Cyrus voice so I can experience my own Ashley [O] moment from Black Mirror."
"Do people really even want this technology to exist? Just because it could doesn’t mean it should," a YouTube commenter noted.
"This can be used so wrong, imagine someone manipulating conversations that sound just like you," someone pointed out on Twitter.
"I’m starting to think some people watch Black Mirror episodes and instead of having the normal reaction of realizing how horrifying it is they get inspired," another Twitter user shared.
Previously, Alexa had been able to mimic the voices of celebrities, but this new technology only takes less than a minute of audio for the AI to learn someone's voice, versus a person having to actually record their voice for hours.
Let's just say the future of technology sounds... interesting.