Amazon's Latest Trick: Pipe In a Dead Person's Voice Through Alexa's Speakers

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

Tweet text:

Jan Wolfe
@JanNWolfe
·
Follow
Amazon's Alexa voice assistant will be able to mimic any person's voice after hearing a short audio clip. Amazon markets the tech as a way to remember a deceased family member.

gizmodo.com
Amazon's Latest Trick: Pipe In a Dead Person's Voice Through Alexa's Speakers
The uncanny valley of the future doesn't just feature lifelike robots; it also includes deep faked voices.
3:44 PM · Jun 22, 2022

https://gizmodo.com/amazon-alexa-deepfake-grandma-re-mars-demo-machine-lear-1849095743

Those weird “loved ones come back from the dead to visit you” stunts pulled by celebrities like Kanye West may soon become a reality through your digital assistant.

At Amazon’s re:MARS conference, the company announced it’s working on a feature that can synthesize short audio clips of a person’s voice and then reprogram it as longer speech. Amazon’s Senior Vice President and Head Scientist for Alexa, Rohit Prasad, showed off a demonstration where, as TechCrunch described, “the voice of a deceased loved one (a grandmother, in this case), is used to read a grandson a bedtime story.”

Prasad noted that the company can do this sort of audio output with merely a minute of speech before continuing: “The way we made it happen is by framing the problem as a voice conversion task and not a speech generation path.”

There aren’t many more details beyond this initial demonstration. Reuters reports that Prahad mentions the goal of this technology is to “make memories last” after “so many of us have lost someone we love,” which makes it seem rather intense.

*snip*



Nope.

[dalton99a]

1. There is a demand for people to hear dead people saying "Did you take the garbage out?"

[Nevilledog]

2. ...

[eleny]

6. Night of the Nagging Dead

[GoodRaisin]

3. Very creepy.

No thanks.

[Historic NY]

4. Not for me,

my sister-in-law had my brother on the answering machine. I won't call her house phone, and I told her too

[Haggard Celine]

5. People do weird things, don't they?

[TlalocW]

7. I wouldn't mind

Hearing, "I love you," in my mom's voice one more time. Unfortunately, I don't think we ever got Mom on video.

[Iggo]

8. Whatever the fuck for?

Jeezus…

[Woodswalker]

9. No

No

[Kaleva]

10. Could ask John Wayne or JFK for a casserole recipe

[Richard_GB]

11. One lady in England might like this service

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-21719848

[Talitha]

12. Ewwwww..... just ewwwww!!!!!

So creepy - on so many levels.
Ewwww......

[genxlib]

13. This is just practice

For the AI improvements to mimic real people. It will get harder and harder to tell when you are talking to a robot when you call customer service.

Eventually, this will be used for audio that needs to go along with the deep fake videos.

In a world that is already factually challenged, we are not prepared for the day when fake videos can have a politician saying or doing anything a programmer wants them to. So far it has been used for novelty and porn but it is only a matter of time before it is weaponized in politics.

[Novara]

14. I have Samuel L. Jackson on my system

He's pretty funny, especially when I ask for the weather and he says, "No! I won't get you the motherfuckin' weather! Just kidding," before he launches into my local weather forecast.

But I don't want my dead relatives' voices on my system. That's creepy.

[Iggo]

15. See now that would be cool.

Sam L is the man.

But I don’t want my dead nana giving me the “Ái, mi hijito” from beyond the grave. That’s just scary!