Amazon seems to be pushing the limits of the ‘uncanny valley’ as it announced that its working on a feature for their Alexa service that will enable the AI platform to speak in your dead relative’s voice. 

The announcement was made by Rohit Prasad, the senior vice president of the Alexa Team. According to him, while Alexa and by extension, artificial intelligence cannot take the place of your loved ones, it can help “make the memories last.”

The feature is currently being developed and was revealed at Amazon’s Re: MARS (Machine Learning, Automation, Robots and Space) conference. Apparently, Alexa will be capable of replicating your dead family member or relative’s voice after hearing the audio for less than a minute.  

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At the conference, Prasad played a video where a child asked Alexa for grandma to finish reading the Wizard of Oz. Alex acquiesces by saying “okay” before it starts reading the story in the child’s grandmother’s voice. 

The ability to mimic voices is a form of artificial intelligence that is “generalised intelligence” according to Prasad. This way, the AI can adapt to a whole host of situations and tweak itself,  as well as gain new information with minimum supervision. This AI is different a compared to Google’s DeepMind which is more focussed on problem-solving AI that is dedicated to understanding human tasks and functions.

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What is unclear is how far along the technology is, or whether what Prasad showed was simply proof of concept. No timeline for the rollout of the tech has been announced. 

As big tech keeps pushing the boundaries of what people might be comfortable with, the security and privacy ramifications cannot be ignored. It may be possible to use the technology to misuse people’s voices and wreaking havoc in their lives. On the other hand, it seems Amazon have finally found a way to get around paying celebrities to voice their AI.