With the help of Amazon's digital assistant Alexa, individuals may soon be able to transform the voices of their deceased loved ones into virtual helpers, allowing you to hear them converse even after traversing a desert of sands.
Your Dead Grandma Will Soon Read You Stories Through Amazon Alexa
According to reports, Alexa can mimic the speech of your deceased grandmother with just a minute or so of given audio.
Rohit Prasad, senior vice president and head scientist for Alexa at Amazon, said that the new technology allows the business to produce some outstanding audio output with just one minute of speech.
"This required inventions where we had to learn to produce a high-quality voice with less than a minute of recording versus hours of recording in the studio," the executive notes per TechCrunch.
Amazon won't disclose when the public and developers will be able to use the new voice-cloning features. There is no timetable or more information.
Grandma Alexa Just The Start of Voice Cloning
Whether or not you like the concept of "Grandma Alexa," the demo shows how text-to-speech has been affected by AI swiftly and raises the possibility that genuinely human-sounding synthetic voices may be far closer than we believe.
The Boulder-based voiceover artist Nina Rolle is thought to have provided the inspiration for the original Alexa, which was introduced in November 2014 with the Echo device.
The technology behind the original Alexa was created by the Polish text-to-speech company Ivona, which Amazon acquired in 2013. However, the conversational manner of the first Alexa left a lot to be desired.
It is not unjustified to be afraid of "deepfake" voices that can deceive people or voice-recognition technologies, Fast Company said.
One 2020 incident saw robbers convincing a Hong Kong bank manager to release $400,000 in money before the scam was uncovered using an artificially created voice.
Dave Limp, senior vice president of Amazon devices, demonstrates Amazon's new Smart Plug with a new version of the Echo Plus during a launch event for Alexa products and services at The Spheres in Seattle on September 20, 2018. - Amazon weaves its Alexa digital assistant into more services and devices as it unveiles new products powered by artificial intelligence including a smart microwave and dash-mounted car gadget.
At the same time, companies are keen to be represented by distinctive voices as speech interactions with technology grow more widespread. Customers also appear to seek technology that sounds more human.
"Alexa is pretty smart, but no matter what the AI-powered assistant talks about, there's no getting around its relatively flat and monotone voice," VentureBeat's 2017 report said.
Samples of AI Cloning
Deepfakes, science fiction, and rock performances that employ holograms to bring back deceased singers like Buddy Holly have all contributed to the rising familiarity of these programs.
Axios, citing The San Francisco Chronicle report, mentioned that a Canadian man who was mourning did something similar with his dead fiancée in real life. In the Netflix series "Black Mirror," a lady converses with a chatbot replica of her late fiancé.
Other instances include the resurrection of Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia and the usage of Anthony Bourdain, the celebrity chef, to narrate a documentary about himself after his passing.
"When we learn about some very sophisticated use of AI to copy a real person, such as in the documentary about Anthony Bourdain, we tend to extrapolate from that situation that AI is much better than it really is," said Amit Roy-Chowdhury, who chairs the robotics department at the University of California, Riverside.
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