Customers will soon be able to customise Alexa, Amazon.com Inc.’s voice assistant, to sound just like their grandmother or anybody else.
According to report, the company held in Las Vegas on Wednesday, the online retailer is working on a technology that would enable Alexa to mimic any voice after hearing less than a minute of audio. After “make the memories last” after “so many of us have lost someone we love”.
When such a feature would be released, Amazon will not say.
The project explores a technological field that has come under intense examination for both its potential uses and misuse. Microsoft Corp. (MSFT.O), for instance, recently put restrictions on which companies might use its voice-recognition software. Although some are concerned that it might also be used to spread political deepfakes, the intention is to assist people who have speech impairments or other issues.
Alexa will hopefully become more common in consumers’ lives thanks to Amazon’s project. But the general public’s focus has already moved on. An developer at Alphabet Inc.’s (GOOGL.O) Google stated that a business chat bot had developed to sentience, which was hotly disputed. According to numbers the company has disclosed for device sales since January 2019, another Amazon official stated on Tuesday that Alexa had 100 million users globally.
According to report, Amazon wants Alexa to have “generalizable intelligence,” or the capacity to adjust to user situations and pick up new ideas without much outside assistance. The all-knowing, all-capable, uber artificial general intelligence, or AGI, that Alphabet’s DeepMind unit and Elon Musk-cofounded OpenAI are seeking, he claimed, “not to be confused with the all-knowing, all-capable, uber artificial general intelligence” this goal.
At the conference, Amazon presented their plans for companionship with Alexa. The phrase “Alexa, can grandma finish reading me the Wizard of Oz?” was used by a young child in a video clip.
After a brief pause, Alexa confirmed the order and raised her voice. She appeared to sound like the person’s grandmother in real life as she spoke soothingly and less robotically.