Amazon’s Alexa is getting set to become the world’s most upsetting impersonator. At the company’s re:MARS conference — named as such because all of its announcements will make you want to leave the planet — Amazon showed off a new, experimental feature that will allow its popular voice assistant to copy anyone’s voice after listening to just a few short audio clips.
There are a lot of reasons that this is a terrible idea, but Amazon was apparently insistent on finding the creepiest possible use case for the technology. When Rohit Prasad, Amazon’s senior vice president and head scientist for Alexa, took the stage to show off the feature, he pitched it as a way to hear the voice of your dead relatives. In the demo, Amazon showed a young boy listening to Alexa read him a bedtime story in the voice of his deceased grandmother.
