Amazon has developed a way for consumers to feel closer to loved ones both still alive and those who have passed away. The company has announced that their new Alexa update will allow the device to speak in the sound of someone’s voice after hearing just a short clip of them speak, CBS News reported.
The company said Alexa’s new capability will “enable lasting personal relationships,” according to CBS News.
For instance, if someone asks Alexa to read a story in their late grandparent or parent’s, the device can, thanks to the ability to take a short recording of someone’s voice and recreate it, CBS News reported.
Senior Vice President and head scientist of Alexa AI at Amazon Rohit Prasad announced the plans at the compnay’s annual “re: Mars” conference on Wednesday.
“While AI can’t eliminate the pain of loss, it can make those relationships last,” Prasad said.
In order to make this new artificial intelligence, the engineers “had to learn to produce a high-quality voice with less than a minute of recording versus hours of recording in the studio,” Prasad said. “The way we made it happen is by framing the problem as a voice conversion task and not a speech generation path.”
During the presentation, a young boy asked the device to have his grandma read him “The Wizard of Oz,” and it did in the child’s grandparent’s voice.