It might well seem like the plot of an episode of Black Mirror, but no, it’s real. At Amazon’s re:Mars conference, a feature of the Alexa voice assistant has been unveiled by which it will be able to imitate human voices, regardless of whether they are still alive or not.
The person in charge of the development of Alexa, Rohit Prasad, announced this feature among other upcoming ones for the Amazon voice assistant.
Alexa will be able to imitate voices
Coming in the future, this new feature can synthesize speech from short audio clips held of a person and reproduce their pitch characteristics in longer speech. With just one minute of voice, the new technology can achieve results very close to those of the person.
The controversy comes from the fact that this can be used even with deceased people of whom some audio is preserved. “While we can’t ease the pain of losing [a loved one during the pandemic], we can definitely make their memory last,” Prasad noted to introduce this feature.
In fact, during the demonstration (about the hour and 2 minutes in the video above) a device configured with this new version of Alexa could be seen reading a story to a child with the voice of his deceased grandmother simply by saying the voice command of Alexa “Alexa, can Grandma finish reading ‘The Wizard of Oz’ to me?”
“The way we made it happen was by framing the problem as a speech conversion task and not a speech generation path. Without a doubt, we are living in the golden age of AI, where our dreams and science fiction are becoming reality ,” Prasad noted.
What uses could it have?
Beyond the moving example, which could well help that little one to remember his grandmother and miss her less, there is no doubt that this new technology powered by Artificial Intelligence, although it represents a great technological advance, has implications that are at least questionable. .
Alexa
Obviously, it can be funny that Alexa can collect clips of some of our favorite characters and sound like that (Darth Vader or Chiquito de la Calzada come to mind, for example). However, it is also a new step in terms of identity theft.
On the other hand, digitally resurrecting a person can understandably be controversial. Obviously we are not going to have the consent of that person to do it, so it is at least questionable if it is ethical to do so.
Amazon has not yet mentioned when it will integrate this function into Alexa , so we will be attentive to the next news about this function and when it could reach our devices with the integrated voice assistant.
The mega-company has also not clarified whether Amazon plans to make this feature a commercial product for its smart speakers and screens or is it just a simple demonstration anecdote about the possibilities of AI. The debate is served.
