Alexa’s latest voice trick might be its creepiest

Alexa can now discuss in a wide variety of distinctive voices, from its new male option to stars this sort of as Melissa McCarthy and Shaquille O’Neal. But researchers at Amazon are looking to choose Alexa’s speech qualities to the up coming stage by allowing her mimic the voices of beloved ones, even from beyond the grave.

During a presentation at Amazon’s re:MARS occasion this 7 days, Alexa head scientist Rohit Prasad confirmed how Alexa could converse in the voice of a child’s (presumably deceased) grandmother, with the voice assistant looking at a passage from The Wizard of Oz to the delighted young boy.

Prasad framed the potential as a way to simplicity the decline of a liked 1 by “mak[ing] their recollections final,” incorporating that his workforce had located a way for Alexa to “produce a large-quality voice” making use of a lot less than a moment of recording.

Prasad didn’t announce when–or even if–the new Alexa voice characteristic would be introduced to the basic community, indicating only that his workforce was “working” on the undertaking.

The new Alexa capability is certainly impressive, but also a great deal creepy. The notion of hearing an AI-powered voice of a long departed relative is as unsettling as it is comforting, and if Alexa could mimic a relative right after listening to their voice for much less than a minute, who else could she mimic?

Of study course, the deepfake genie is already nicely out of the bottle, so possibly Amazon can place it to excellent use with Alexa’s help. And certainly, Prasad went for a much more utopian approach even though demonstrating the feature, saying that we are “living in the golden period of AI where our goals and science fiction are becoming a reality,”

Probably so! But forgive these of us who are however a tad creeped out.