Alexa May Soon Be Able To Read Stories In Deceased Relatives Voices

At Amazon's re: MARS conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, the tech corporation revealed its aspirations to create a system that enables the gadget to mimic any voice after hearing less than a minute of audio (22 June).

The feature was demonstrated to participants by Rohit Prasad, senior vice president and lead scientist of Alexa at Amazon. He stated that the goal of the feature is to "make the memories last" with the assistance of the gadget.

Attendees watched as a young child asked Alexa to finish reading them the Wizard of Oz while showcasing the function to the crowd in a demonstration video.

After briefly confirming the request, Alexa smoothly switched from her robotically-sounding typical voice to that of the child's grandmother.

TechCrunch+ reports that Prasad said: "This required inventions where we had to learn to produce a high-quality voice with less than a minute of the recording versus hours of recording in the studio.”

"The way we made it happen is by framing the problem as a voice conversion task and not a speech generation path.”

"We are unquestionably living in the golden era of artificial intelligence, where our dreams and science fiction are becoming a reality."

According to CNBC, Prasad stated that the purpose of the virtual assistant technology has been to create artificial intelligence to offer consolation, particularly since "so many of us have lost someone we love" during the pandemic.

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He added that while Alexa can’t 'eliminate that pain of loss, it can make the memories last.

The company's announcement reveals that the days of merely being able to use Alexa to play music or switch on the lights are over, even if Prasad didn't specify when the feature will be made available to consumers.

Amazon presented Proteus and Cardinal, their first autonomous warehouse robots, elsewhere during the conference.

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The company shared via a press release: "Proteus will initially be deployed in the outbound GoCart handling areas in our fulfillment centers and sort centers.”

"Our vision is to automate GoCart handling throughout the network, which will help reduce the need for people to manually move heavy objects through our facility and instead let them focus on more rewarding work."

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Cardinal may identify and classify luggage and parcels and "lower the danger of personnel injury" whereas Proteus will concentrate on the GoCart handling regions.

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