(Tony Sifert, Headline USA) Amazon’s virtual assistant technology, Alexa, will soon be able to speak to you with the voice of your dead relatives, Sky News reported.
During Amazon‘s re:MARS Conference in Las Vegas, senior vice president and head Alexa scientist Rohit Prasad cited the pandemic as a motivating factor behind the development and said that Amazon’s aim was to “make memories last.”
The technology is apparently able to produce an accurate imitation of a human being’s voice with less than a minute’s worth of audio.
The artificially-resurrected voice could then be selected as Alexa’s own.
“This required inventions where we 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.”
As he called on “Alexa” to change her voice accordingly, Prasad suggested that the development was part of a wider transition to a world in which reality is always-already mediated by artificial intelligence.
“We are unquestionably living in the golden era of AI, where our dreams and science fictions are becoming a reality,” he said.
That is undoubtedly a world that will be governed by what political scientist James Poulos has dubbed “cyborg theocracy.”
“The ultimate in prestige and power is being an archpriest in the cyborg theocracy,” Poulos wrote in October 2021.
“The only practicable way to achieve this omnipotent control is through a centralized social credit system, a sort of cyborg vivarium in which . . . the virtual world the regime has locked you inside becomes the world that really matters,” he continued.
Cyborg Theocracy https://t.co/ob9ZcB2jU4
— Mary Harrington (@moveincircles) June 23, 2022
The news follows closely on reports that Google’s AI sytem — called The Language Model for Dialogue Applications (Lamda) — has become “sentient,” according to the system’s engineer Blake Lemoine.
