Amazon has shown off a new experimental Alexa feature, which will allow the AI assistant to mimic the voice of a user’s dead relatives.
The company demoed the new experience at their annual re:MARS, or Machine Learning, Automation, Robotics, and Space event. Amazon’s head scientist for Alexa AI, Rohit Prasad, showed a video in which a child asks Alexa to read a bedtime story in the voice of his dead grandmother.
Prasad introduced the clip by saying that adding “human attributes” to AI systems was increasingly important “in these times of the ongoing pandemic, when so many of us have lost someone we love.”
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Amazon has not clarified whether this feature will ever be made available to the public, but claims that its systems can imitate someone’s voice from just a minute of recorded audio.
Social media users have called the controversial feature ‘horrifying’ and ‘creepy’, as the world already grapples with questions of ethics around deepfakes in both audio and video.