At its annual MARS conference in Las Vegas, Amazon announced that they are working on an update that would allow Alexa to mimic anyone’s voice.
Amazon’s Alexa is a voice-controlled virtual assistant. It can play music, control smart homes, shop and engage your favorite services to keep you organized, informed, connected, and entertained.
An Amazon senior vice president, Rohit Prasad, said the updated system could collect the needed voice data from a minute of audio listening to make the personalization possible, rather than having someone spend hours in a recording studio like it’s done in the past.
In a video shown on stage, Amazon displayed how, instead of Alexa’s signature voice reading “the Wizard of Oz” to a young boy, it was his grandmother’s voice.
Amazon has always looked for new ways to add human attributes and a personalized experience to Alexa’s services, more importantly, “in these times of the ongoing pandemic when so many of us have lost someone we love,” Prasad said. “While AI can’t eliminate that pain of loss, it can definitely make their memories last.”
Adam Wright, a senior analyst at Internation Data Corporation (IDC)Research, said he sees the value in Amazon’s effort. Although “Amazon’s foray into personalized Alexa voices may struggle most with the strange valley effect of recreating a loved one’s voice but isn’t quite it, leading to rejection by real humans, especially if this loved one is deceased.
Also, Micheal Inouye of ABI Research said,” There are certainly some risks, such as if the voice and AI interactions don’t match well with the loved ones’ memories of that individual,” “some may view this as weird or outright terrible, but for others, it could be viewed in a deeper way like the illustration given by letting a child hear their grandmother’s voice, maybe for the first time and in a gentle way that isn’t a strict recording from the past.”
Please visit us @GoSpeedHub on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for more information.
Photo by Rahul Chakraborty
