Amazon's Alexa can now Mimic Voices of Dead People

What if someone told you, you could speak to your family members even after they passed away? According to TechCrunch, Amazon is planning to offer this unique service to its users by developing a system that would let Alexa mimic any voice up on hearing for less than a minute. 

Amazon’s Senior Vice President and Head Scientist for Alexa, Rohit Prasad said, “This required inventions where we had to learn to produce a high-quality voice with less than a minute of recording versus hours of recording in the studio. The way we made it happen is by framing the problem as a voice conversion task and not a speech generation path. We are unquestionably living in the golden era of AI, where our dreams and science fictions are becoming a reality.”

Prasad said the goal of the company is to adapt to user environment as quickly as possible with little external output. At the annual conference conducted by the company in Las Vegas, the company played a video that portrayed a child who asked, “Alexa, can grandma finish reading me the Wizard of Oz?"

Alexa grasped the command and changed her voice to a soft-spoken, affable, and gentle-sounding person similar to the child’s grandmother in real life.  

However, the netizens on Twitter say, the technology could be used for evasive activities. One such user said, “This (or similar) tech is already used in (mostly) corporate fraud. In ex someone calls the secretary sounding like its the boss who is calling, asking for an urgent bank transfer from the accountant… I mean, for this product there must be a serious licence. Sad lobbypower,”

Amazon did not reveal when exactly it would roll out the feature.