Amazon predicts that Alexa can speak in anyone’s voice, even the dead

The e-commerce giant Amazon has begun training its AI assistant Alexaincluded in your Echo speakers, so you can adopt anyone’s voice including that of a deceased family memberall according to the preferences of its consumers.

This evolution of the usual wizard will have the ability to detect the timbre and diction characteristics of the voice of a person and imitate him. It is an important step to humanize the relationship between people and machines.

Amazon’s goal is to make the process very simple and that a simple registration of less than a minute is sufficient. We want to “make memories last” after a pandemic in which “many of us have lost a loved one,” said Rohit Prasad, senior vice president of Amazon, at a conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday.

Prasad pointed out that the goal is to provide the ability for Alexa to do this adapt to the life of consumers and learn small concepts without the need for a large amount of external information.

This approach is diametrically opposite to that used by omniscient and omnipotent artificial intelligences such as The deep mind of Alphabet (formerly Google) or the different solutions of Open the AIcompany founded by Elon Musk.

FROM-2the robot capable of creating illustrations through commands written in natural language, is trained with billions of images unlike assistants like Alexa or Siriwho have less information for privacy reasons.

But Alexa’s goal isn’t to be omnipotent, like Alphabet’s DeepMind (formerly Google) or Elon Musk’s OpenAI. Alone pretend to be a nice companion which offers you the weather forecast, calendar appointments or new offers on Amazon. Alexa is a nice shop assistant.

However, adopt a familiar voice can completely change the user’s usage and expectations.

At the presentation, Amazon showed a promotional clip about this idea. In it, a child asked Alexa to “finish her grandmother’s reading of ‘Wizard of Oz'”. Alexa immediately changed her characteristic robotic voice to Grandma’s voice. For the child, while aware of listening to a speaker, it was his grandmother who read the story and not Alexa.

A priori, an artificial intelligence is everything that the user creates intelligent. If the assistant answers all of our questions like a human being, the consumer will end up thinking about chatting with one of them. Someone who understands you and loves you.

Microsoft warns about the excessive use of artificial intelligence

But other tech companies are wary of making digital voice dubbing so easy to produce. Ahead of Amazon’s announcement, Microsoft posted new ethical rules of artificial intelligence (AI) that would place severe limits on who could create synthetic voices and how they could do it. to be used.

“It’s easy to imagine how it could be used to impersonate speakers inappropriately and fool the listeners“said Natasha Crampton, the company’s director of artificial intelligence.

For now, Microsoft will require companies request permission to create artificial voicesand last month he began marking them with an inaudible signal that would allow him to identify misuse.

The concept of using AI to bring back to life the memory of a deceased person, or who appears to be, is not new, not even outside the realm of science fiction.

In 2020, Joshua Barbeau trained a version of the GPT-3 chatbot on the logs of conversations with his late girlfriend Jessica, who died eight years earlier. And in 2018, Eugenia Kuyda built another one from the old text messages of her partner Roman Mazurenko.

SL