{"id":11090,"date":"2022-06-23T16:28:42","date_gmt":"2022-06-23T23:28:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peninsula360press.com\/?p=11090"},"modified":"2022-06-27T18:01:51","modified_gmt":"2022-06-28T01:01:51","slug":"alexa-will-bring-voices-of-deceased-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peninsula360press.com\/en\/alexa-will-bring-voices-of-deceased-people\/","title":{"rendered":"Alexa to bring back the voice of deceased people"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"alexa\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

How many times have we wanted to hear, even if just one more time, the voice of someone we loved who passed away? Alexa, Amazon's virtual assistant, will be able to give its customers that opportunity in the near future through audio messages that will bring back to our ears the person we miss so much.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Using Artificial Intelligence (AI), application engineers will be able to imitate the voices of deceased people whom we wish to hear again in audio messages lasting up to one minute.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMany of us have lost a loved one, and while AI can\u2019t take away the pain of loss, it can make memories of them last,\u201d said Rohit Prasad, Alexa\u2019s senior vice president and chief AI scientist, during his keynote address at the re:MARS conference in Las Vegas, Nevada.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The development of what will become one of Alexa's many features is based on replicating the speech of a dead relative, based on less than a minute of recorded audio from the original person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During Amazon's global AI event for machine learning, automation, robotics and space \u2012re:MARS\u2012, the executive gave a demonstration of what the assistant will be able to do through an Echo Dot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAlexa, can Grandma finish reading me The Wizard of Oz?\u201d Prasad asked out loud. The assistant, in her typical voice, replied, \u201cOkay!\u201d Then, when the device began narrating a scene from the Cowardly Lion calling for courage, Alexa\u2019s robotic tone was replaced by a more human-sounding narrator.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cInstead of Alexa\u2019s voice reading the book, it\u2019s the voice of the child\u2019s grandmother,\u201d Rohit Prasad enthusiastically explained.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The goal of the Alexa feature, Amazon's still-in-development virtual assistant, is to build greater trust with users by infusing artificial intelligence with the "human attributes of empathy and caring."<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The engineer mentioned that Amazon developers learned to \u201cproduce a high-quality voice with less than a minute of recording\u201d in addition to focusing on the ability to reproduce the voice of a deceased loved one as a conversion task rather than a speech generation task.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rohit Prasad stressed that the device's advances in functionality have come from the same needs that users have pointed out over time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although he did not indicate when this function would be available, he did emphasize that they are working on it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe are certainly living in the golden age of AI, where our dreams and science fiction are becoming reality,\u201d Prasad said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not everyone was enthusiastic about the announcement, with experts saying that while the prospect of hearing a dead relative's voice can be heart-warming, it also raises a host of ethical and safety concerns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

"I don't feel like our world is ready for easy-to-use voice cloning technology," Rachel Tobac, chief executive of San Francisco-based SocialProof Security, told The Washington Post.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He further explained that if a cybercriminal can easily and credibly replicate another person's voice with a short voice sample, they can use that sample to impersonate other people, which can lead to identity theft, fraud, data loss, account takeover, and more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With information from The Washington Post<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You may be interested in: Burlingame to be home to Meta's first physical store<\/a><\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00bfCu\u00e1ntas veces hemos querido escuchar, aunque sea solo por una vez m\u00e1s, la voz de alguna persona que amamos y falleci\u00f3?  Alexa, el asistente virtual de Amazon podr\u00e1 en un futuro cercano dar esa oportunidad a sus clientes a trav\u00e9s de mensajes de sonido que traer\u00e1n de vuelta a nuestros o\u00eddos a quien tanto extra\u00f1amos. […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":11092,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-11090","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cover","8":"category-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peninsula360press.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peninsula360press.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peninsula360press.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peninsula360press.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/29"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peninsula360press.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11090"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/peninsula360press.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11090\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11095,"href":"https:\/\/peninsula360press.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11090\/revisions\/11095"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peninsula360press.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11092"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peninsula360press.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peninsula360press.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peninsula360press.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}