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Amazon wants Alexa to imitate the voice of anyone, even deceased

Amazon Alexa.  (photo: Al Día News)
Amazon Alexa. (photo: Al Día News)

amazon is training his assistant AI, Alexato adopt the voice of any person according to the preferences of the client. The assistant will be able to detect the timbre and transposition characteristics of a person’s voice and imitate it. This is an important step towards the humanization of the relationship between man and animals. smart devices.

“We want to make memories last” after a pandemic in which “many of us have lost a loved one,” Amazon’s senior vice president, rohit prasadat a conference in Las Vegas, United States.

Prasad points out that the goal is to give Alexa the ability to adapt to the lives of consumers and learn small concepts from them without the need for large amounts of external information.

This approach contrasts with omnipotent and omniscient artificial intelligence, such as deep mind of Alphabet or multiple solutions OpenAIa company founded by Elon Musk.

DALLE-2a robot capable of creating illustrations through commands written in natural language, it is trained with billions of images, unlike assistants like Alexa or Siri, that have less information for reasons of privacy. But Alexa’s goal is not to be or appear omnipotent.

It simply pretends to be a good companion that provides the weather forecast, appointment schedule or new Amazon offers.

A virtual assistant that doesn’t need to be so smart

However, using a familiar voice can radically change user usage and expectations. During the launch, Amazon released a small promotional video about the idea.

In it, a child asks Alexa if she “finished reading ‘The Wizard of Oz’.” Alexa abandoned her soft robotic voice, and changed it to her grandmother’s. For the boy, although aware that she is listening to the announcer, It was her grandmother who read the story, not Alexa.

This opens an interesting debate. Maybe Alexa isn’t as conscientious, smart or smart as Amazon claims. But that does not matter. Artificial intelligence is anything a user creates that is intelligent. If the assistant answered all the questions like a human being, the consumer would think that he was talking to one of them.

Alexa.  (photo: Zacharie Scheurer/dpa)
Alexa. (photo: Zacharie Scheurer/dpa)

Attendees don’t have to be conscientious, smart, and opinionated to be seen as colleagues or friends in the not-too-distant future. Scientifically, A dog’s level of intelligence, will, and conscience can be debated, but no owner doubts that they understand and love them.

But to make this connection, you have to go through the human forms of expression, the humor, the quirks and the emotional voices of the users. Sounding like a person is an important step in creating that mask. to abstract that person and forget that you are talking to a robot.

Maybe in the future, people end up living with robots that talk to them and tell them what they want to hear. In a society with more and more single people and fewer children, this idea does not seem unreasonable.

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