Amazon’s Alexa to imitate voices of departed
Amazon’s Alexa will be able to resurrect the voices of dead family members using technology that can impersonate speech from recordings less than a minute long.
The company displayed the feature allowing the synthetic voice of a deceased grandmother to read to her grandson.
In a video displaying the technology, a child asked: “Alexa, can Grandma finish reading me the Wizard of Oz?”
The smart speaker acknowledged the request before switching to a replica of the grandmother’s voice.
Amazon did not say when it expected to release the feature or whether it planned to restrict how it was used.
Improvements in voice recognition have allowed companies to create increasingly lifelike digital voices, causing concerns that the technology could be used to mimic public figures or to defraud people.
Speaking at Amazon’s RE:MARS conference, where the feature was unveiled, Rohit Prasad, Alexa’s chief scientist, said: “While AI can’t eliminate that pain of loss, it can definitely make the memories last.”
He added that “so many of us have lost someone we love” during the pandemic.
Voices could be generated using less than a minute of audio, Prasad said, compared to hours of recording in a studio that was previously required.
Prasad said Amazon was also seeking to make the Alexa assistant more lifelike so it could exhibit “human-like common sense” and “human-like empathy”.
Last year, Microsoft patented a chatbot that would be able to mimic a “past or present entity — such as a friend, a relative, an acquaintance, a celebrity, a fictional character, a historical figure”.
Microsoft this week said replicating voices would require strict controls and disclosures.
People have previously uploaded text message records of dead relatives to chatbot programs, allowing them to converse with artificial intelligence imitations of lost loved ones.
One individual who recreated his fiancee using chatbot software after she died of a rare liver disease said the technology had helped him find closure and re-opened old wounds, with “more of the former than the latter”.
The technology is likely to lead to fears that it could be used to bypass security systems.
Several banks use voice recognition as an alternative to telephone banking passwords.
In 2019, a manager at a British energy company lost almost £200,000 after fraudsters used AI to fake his boss’ voice, directing him to transfer the company’s funds to a foreign bank account.
More than half of households in Britain have a smart speaker, according to Ofcom, with the majority owning an Amazon Echo speaker.