Amazon wants to give its customers the opportunity to make their voice assistant Alexa sound the same as they want.
At a conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, Amazon Senior Vice President Rohit Prasad developed a system that allows online retailers to listen to less than a minute of audio and then allow Alexa to imitate any audio. Said that.
Prasad added that the goal is to “make memories last longer” after “many of us have lost a loved one” during a pandemic.
Amazon refused to share when to deploy such features.
This work goes into the field of technology, which has been scrutinized for potential benefits and abuses.
For example, Microsoft recently restricted companies that could use software to make their voices parrots. The goal is to help people with speech disorders and other problems, but some are concerned that it could also be used to spread political deepfake.
Amazon hopes this project will help Alexa become ubiquitous in the lives of shoppers. However, public attention has already moved elsewhere.
At Google, engineers made a highly contested claim that the company’s chatbots were more sensitive.
Another Amazon executive said Tuesday that Alexa has 100 million customers worldwide, consistent with the numbers it provided for device sales since January 2019.
According to Prasad, Amazon’s Alexa’s purpose is “generalizable intelligence,” the ability to adapt to the user environment and learn new concepts with little external input.
He said the goal is “know everything, have all the power, not to be confused with super-artificial intelligence,” that is, the AGI sought by OpenAI, co-founded by Alphabet’s DeepMind unit and Elon Musk. rice field.
Amazon shared a vision of dating with Alexa at the meeting. The video segment depicts a child asking, “Alexa, can Grandma finish reading the Wizard of Oz?”
After a while, Alexa confirmed the command and changed his voice. She calmed down and spoke, not a robot, but seemingly like an individual grandmother in real life. -Reuters
