Google Assistant Alexa to Soon Allow Users to Add Voices of Deceased Loved Ones

Sophie Webster, Tech Times 22 June 2022, 11:06 pm

E-commerce giant Amazon is reportedly working on a way for its users to talk to their deceased family members through its Alexa voice assistant.

Alexa's New Voice Feature

On June 22, Rohit Prasad, the company's senior vice president and head scientist, talked about Alexa and its upcoming features at Amazon's Re:Mars conference in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Prasad detailed a feature that allows Alexa to replicate a specific human voice, even those that were long gone.

According to CNBC, Prasad demonstrated the feature by letting a child ask Alexa to have her grandmother read her a bedtime story.

Alexa then confirmed the request with its robotic voice and it immediately switched to a softer tone, mimicking the child's grandmother.

Also Read: Alexa Vs Similarweb; Why Is Alexa Shutting Down?

The Alexa team at Amazon was able to create a model that lets its voice assistant to produce a high-quality and human-like voice "with less than a minute of recorded audio," according to Prasad.

The new voice feature is currently in development, and Amazon did not reveal when it plans to roll out the feature to its users, according to Gizmodo.

While the feature could be used to replicate any voice, Prasad said that it can be used to help mimic the voice of a deceased family member and it can help those who are still grieving.

Prasad said that making artificial intelligence conversational and comforting has become a key focus for the Alexa team, especially since a lot of people have suddenly lost a family member during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The head of the Alexa team added that even though artificial intelligence can't remove the pain of loss, it can help make memories last and the process a tad bit easier.

Amazon wants to make conversing with Alex ever more natural, and it has rolled out several features that enable its voice assistant to replicate more dialogue to make it more human-like.

Asking Alexa Questions

Amazon has been working on Alexa for years, and in its quest to make the voice assistant more comforting to talk to, the e-commerce giant has allowed users to converse with it.

In 2020, Amazon users were given the ability to ask Alexa questions. The feature is called Hunches, and according to CNET, it has rolled out since the announcement, and now it is common to hear the voice command outside of her old, robotic voice.

The voice assistant will ask users follow-up questions to their commands or questions, and this is because Alexa is anticipating requests.

But Hunches were only the beginning. During Alexa Live developers conference in July 2020, Amazon announced the give-and-take conversations with the voice assistant.

This feature was implemented by third-party developers and in the next couple of months, Alexa started to ask follow-up questions after the usual commands.

Although these new features seem like incremental improvements, they could change how people understand and use voice assistants.

All of these updates are similar to what has been done in movies, like having banters with AIs, asking AIs to mimic someone's voice, giving AIs commands and more.