Amazon plans to let people turn the voices of their deceased loved ones into digital assistants, as the company promises the ability to “make memories last.”

company The development of technology that will allow its digital assistant Alexa It mimics the sound of anyone listening from the presented audio in less than a minute, Rohit Prasad, Senior Vice President and Chief Scientist, explained on Wednesday. He added that during the coronavirus pandemic, “many of us have lost loved ones.”

Although a release date was not provided for this feature, the underlying technology has been around for several years. company Demo using the rolling voice of an elderly woman reading a story to her grandson Before bed, after Alexa asked, “Can Grandma finish reading The Wizard of Oz to me?”

Prasad commented, “The way we have accomplished this is by framing the problem as if it were a speech transmission task rather than a speech generation pathway.”

Aside from the initial rendering, not many details were provided. The technology was announced at the re:Mars conference that focused on its achievements Ambient computing in the areas of machine learning, automation, robotics, and aerospace.

Prasad added that Amazon’s goal for its voice assistant is “generalizable intelligence,” as opposed to science fiction’s “artificial, capable, super general intelligence.”

however, Other tech companies have been wary of creating digital audio multipliers so easilyHours before Amazon announced its plans, Microsoft published new ethics rules on artificial intelligence (AI) that will place strict limits on who can create artificial voices and how they can be used. “It’s easy…to imagine how it could be used to improperly impersonate speakers and mislead listeners,” said Natasha Crampton, the company’s chief AI officer.

Microsoft will require companies to apply for permission to create synthetic sounds, and last month began watermarking them with an inaudible signal that allows them to identify misuse.

The concept of using AI to resurrect the dead – or make it look like one – is not new, even outside the realm of science fiction. In 2020, Joshua Barbeau trained a version of the chatbot GPT-3 from chat logs with his late fiancée Jessica, who died eight years earlier. s In 2018, Eugenia Kuyda created a chatbot from the old text messages of her partner Roman Mazurenko.. “I didn’t expect it to be so shocking. I usually find it very difficult to show emotion and think of sadness, so I mostly tried to avoid it. Talking to Avatar Roman was facing these demons,” he commented at the time..