Amazon's Alexa could use the voices of the dead 'to make memories last'. The company said its voice assistant will be able to channel dead people and speak as they would in a forthcoming update
The technology will see Alexa mimicking the voice of anyone it hears, with the company pointing to the pandemic. Rohit Prasad, Amazon senior vice-president and head scientist said that during the coronavirus paramedic "so many of us have lost someone we love".
Amazon said that the new Alexa feature will not "eliminate (the) pain of loss”. But it said it hoped that the new Alexa voices would "make their memories last".
No timescale was given for when the new feature will be introduced. Mr Prasad said: “The way we made it happen is by framing the problem as a voice conversion task and not a speech generation path".
He said the feature would require only a minute of recorded audio to be fed into the system. The recording would then be used to construct a whole voice.
The announcement from Amazon appears to show that the feature already works. After a child asks Alexa they want "grandma finish reading me The Wonderful Wizard of Oz", the digital assistant seemingly channels the voice of and adopts a soothing tone.
