Amazon’s Alexa May Soon Be Able To Mimic The Voice Of Anyone, Even Dead Relatives

“Hey Alexa, can you summon the dead spirit of my Nana?” is something that you may be able to do soon. CNBC says that Amazon has announced a new development in their Alexa voice assistant. At Amazon’s Re:Mars conference in Las Vegas this week, they announced that they’re working on a new feature that allows you to have Alexa “replicate” human voices; even dead people. Excellent! The dead have not been pestered enough, actually.

If you thought Jeff Bezos‘ dick rocket was the most deranged thing his company was capable of coming up with, buckle up. At Wednesday’s demonstration, Senior Vice President and Head Scientist for the Alexa Team, Rohit Prasad, presented Alexa mimicking a dead person’s voice, and while someone else might find a dead grandmother reading her grandchild a story from beyond the grave cute–I am not that person:

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

Alexa confirmed the request with the default, robotic voice, then immediately switched to a softer, more humanlike tone, seemingly mimicking the child’s family member.

The Alexa team developed a model that allows its voice assistant to produce a high-quality voice with “less than a minute of recorded audio,” Prasad said…

While it could ostensibly be used to replicate any voice, Prasad suggested it could be used to help memorialize a deceased family member.

Making artificial intelligence conversational and companion-like has become a key focus, especially given that “so many of us have lost someone we love” during the Covid-19 pandemic, Prasad said.

“While AI can’t eliminate that pain of loss, it can definitely make the memories last,” he added.

The e-commerce giant wants to make conversing with Alexa more natural in general, and has rolled out a series of features that enable its voice assistant to replicate more humanlike dialogue, even to the point of asking a user questions.

This feature is still in development and there was no announcement as to when it will be publicly available.

Welp, someone call the Long Island Medium–because she is officially out of work. Who needs Theresa Caputo exploiting you through a dead relative’s voice from beyond the grave when Alexa can do it for you?

Pic: Amazon