Amazon Develops Alexa That Can Imitate Every Human Voice, Potentially Abused

Amazon made a new feature in Alexa that can imitate any human voice. (photo: doc. pixabay)

JAKARTA - Amazon.com Inc wants to give customers the opportunity to make Alexa, Amazon's voice assistant, sound like their grandmother's voice, or whoever.

This online retailer is developing a system that will allow Alexa to mimic any sound after hearing the audio for less than a minute. The new feature was announced by Rohit Prasad, Amazon's senior vice president, at a press conference Amazon held in Las Vegas, Wednesday, June 22.

Amazon shared its vision of making friends with Alexa at the conference. In a video segment, a child is depicted asking, "Alexa, can you finish reading me Wizard of Oz?"

A moment later, Alexa confirmed the command and changed her voice. She spoke calmly, unlike a robot, as if she sounded like someone's grandmother in real life.

"The purpose of this new feature is to "capture memories" after so many of us lost someone we love during the pandemic," Prasad said, as quoted by Reuters.

Prasad said Amazon's goal this time for Alexa is to create "generalizable intelligence," or the ability to adapt to a user's environment and learn new concepts with little external input.

He said the goal was "not to be confused with the general all-knowing, all-round, uber artificial intelligence," or AGI, which Alphabet's DeepMind and OpenAI units co-founded with Elon Musk seek.

But Amazon still refuses to share when the feature will be officially launched. Amazon also hopes the project will help Alexa become ubiquitous in shoppers' lives. But public attention has shifted elsewhere.

This business has entered the field of technology which has been subject to intense scrutiny due to the potential benefits and misuse of these features.

For example, Microsoft Corp. recently restricted which businesses can use its software to imitate parrot sounds. Its purpose is to help people with speech disorders or other problems. But some fear that the technology could also be used to spread political lies.

At Alphabet Inc's Google, an engineer made a strongly contested claim that the company's chat bot has evolved into a feeling.

Another Amazon executive said Tuesday that Alexa has 100 million subscribers globally, in line with the numbers they have provided for device sales since January 2019.