Amazon’s Alexa Will Soon Deepfake Voices Of Your Deadly Loved Ones
Amazon is a company that earns its reputation by staying at the forefront of technological innovations and advancements. Some of its originals, like Ring, Amazon Echo, Fire Tablet, etc., have all become staples in the day-to-day life of users.
Alexa is another of Amazon’s extraordinary products, making responsibilities more manageable and convenient. The assistant is easy to operate and can set reminders, timers, alarms, and play music; you just need to tell it to. Virtual Assistants are highly popular because anything you want to do is just one command away.
Alexa’s unique new feature
Amazon regularly updates Alexa with new features that enhance its functionality. However, its recent feature is one you might not want to miss.
Senior Vice President and Head Scientist for Alexa, Rohit Prasad, took over the stage at the annual re: Mars conference in Las Vegas to announce many exclusive features for smart assistants. The most unique of the one was a feature that can turn short audio clips into long speeches.
The audience at the event got a great look at the feature, in which the voice of a loved one (a grandmother in the case) was used to read bedtime stories to a grandson.
Using new technology, Alexa produced output audio through one minute of speech. In layman’s terms, your deceased loved ones can now read your stories with minimal audio input.
How Amazon did it
Now, to achieve this feat, Amazon had to develop inventions where it could learn to produce good quality voice output with barely a minute of recording, rather than hours of recording in studios.
They framed it not as a speech generation path but as a voice conversion task to make it happen. Prasad concluded that we are living in the golden era of Artificial Intelligence, where everything is a possibility.
Currently, details about this new feature are scarce, and there are no set specifications. What remains to be seen is how Alexa users react to this peculiar yet fascinating new feature of the device.
