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Amazon to feed souls of departed loved ones to the demon Alexa

DrForester

DrForester

Mod of the Year 2006
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Oct 25, 2017
21,704
gizmodo.com

Amazon's Latest Trick: Pipe In a Dead Person's Voice Through Alexa's Speakers

The uncanny valley of the future doesn't just feature lifelike robots; it also includes deep faked voices.
gizmodo.com gizmodo.com

Those weird "loved ones come back from the dead to visit you" stunts pulled by celebrities like Kanye West may soon become a reality through your digital assistant.

At Amazon's re:MARS conference, the company announced it's working on a feature that can synthesize short audio clips of a person's voice and then reprogram it as longer speech. Amazon's Senior Vice President and Head Scientist for Alexa, Rohit Prasad, showed off a demonstration where, as TechCrunch described, "the voice of a deceased loved one (a grandmother, in this case), is used to read a grandson a bedtime story."

Prasad noted that the company can do this sort of audio output with merely a minute of speech before continuing: "The way we made it happen is by framing the problem as a voice conversion task and not a speech generation path."

There aren't many more details beyond this initial demonstration. Reuters reports that Prahad mentions the goal of this technology is to "make memories last" after "so many of us have lost someone we love," which makes it seem rather intense.
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Dead loved ones aside, I am curious how easy it would be for people to just get celebrities or favorite character voices. They sell those, so I wonder how they could stop parents from maybe sampling a Superhero or favorite Disney character.
 
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gozu

gozu

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Oct 27, 2017
10,341
America
Can't the voice of ...an alive person be used to read those stories instead? Why does it always have to be dead people? smh
 
Netherscourge

Netherscourge

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Oct 25, 2017
18,930
This is like Jessie playing his girlfriend's voicemail greeting over and over again, in Breaking Bad.

It's too sad to comprehend.
 
Biske

Biske

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Nov 11, 2017
8,273
I dunno I think that's pretty cool. When you lose someone after a time you lose your clear memory of how they looked, how they sounded. Could be great to be able to keep that.
 
Tavernade

Tavernade

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Sep 18, 2018
8,633
I don't really see the scenario in which this would be helpful to someone grieving.

Like, if it was an actual AI based on a dead person or having their memories that'd be something, but this is just the cheap robot from "World of Tomorrow" with a corpse's head on a stick that wiggles around for people who can't afford cloning. Although I guess if it did have their conscious it would be the box from "World of Tomorrow" where they put grandpa's brain in a digital cube and upload movies for him to watch and he just constantly emails them back screaming.

People at tech companies should watch "World of Tomorrow" and make sure they're not copying things from a pitch black parody and doing them for real.
 
Papatulus

Papatulus

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Sep 27, 2021
871
Biske said:
I dunno I think that's pretty cool. When you lose someone after a time you lose your clear memory of how they looked, how they sounded. Could be great to be able to keep that.
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its an AI synthesizing the voice, it wont be how they sounded rather a bastardization of it filtered thru the unfeeling filter of an AI
 
Cats

Cats

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Oct 27, 2017
2,929
Getting some decent synthed speech is troublesome for deepfaking and stuff, but it can be great for creative media creation. Imagine the time saved by finally having great Text to Speech that can mimic the style and tone of like, Morgan Freeman's voice (not copy, mimic).

But, this idea... some ideas are just stinkers. Dump this, lets not and say we didn't.
 
Alpheus

Alpheus

Member
Oct 25, 2017
7,655
That just makes me more certain I'm never buying any of these devices for the home. Paranoid enough about my phone what with the targeted ads
 
Glasfrut

Glasfrut

Avenger
Oct 27, 2017
3,536
I'm...curious...

Like, if I could get the AI to read a letter or email from a loved one. Might be comforting in my old age? Not sure. But it's Amazon so I'm not sure how to feel about this
 
Dalek

Dalek

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Oct 25, 2017
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Deleted member 8257

Oct 26, 2017
24,586
Someone is going to Hitler this and make him sing Gangnam Style or something. This is obviously not throught through fully.
 
mbpm

mbpm

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Oct 25, 2017
23,618
This is a little hyperbolic. What if the souls asked to be sacrificed to the Elder God Alexa? :) and their family got a sweet commission
 

MDCrabCakeFan86

Member
May 31, 2022
1,736
I've recently read an article about a tech start-up that has AI voice cloning technology that is actually being used and the CEO of this start-up has stated it is possible to recreate the voice of dead people using their AI voice cloning tech, I would not be surprised if Amazon actually acquires this tech start-up to use to clone voices of dead people to use for Alexa voices: https://www.polygon.com/star-wars/23178636/respeecher-star-wars-ceo-interview-luke-vader

If you've ever watched a Star Wars show on Disney Plus, there's a good chance you're familiar with the work of tech startup Respeecher, whether you realize it or not. The Ukrainian company's AI-powered voice cloning platform provided Mark Hamill's de-aged vocal performance in both The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett, as well as for an as-yet-unidentified character in Obi-Wan Kenobi. Lucasfilm has asked Respeecher to keep the name of that character a secret for now — and with so many franchise veterans returning for the series, there's certainly no shortage of potential candidates.

"There are always different visions of how things should happen in the industry and the fans have different thoughts about how they should happen. I wouldn't say that [Respeecher] is very well suited to be in charge or judge [which approach is best]," he says. Serdiuk also made it clear that should Lucasfilm ever call upon Respeecher to re-create the voice of a dead actor, the company would only do so with the approval of that actor's estate. And while Serdiuk's response will set voice actors at ease for now, the fact that Lucasfilm is a repeat Respeecher customer suggests the startup has made serious in-roads for voice cloning technology.
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FerrisBueller

FerrisBueller

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Jul 15, 2018
2,873
UK
Oh great, should be fun when it glitches out and grandma's ghost starts reading the weather forecast in the middle of sexy time.
 
Sordid Plebeian

Sordid Plebeian

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Oct 26, 2017
17,381
I can't wait for my grandpa to come back and tell me about what his favorite show on Amazon prime is to watch in heaven
 
Lord Error

Lord Error

Member
Oct 27, 2017
4,369
At long last we created the Torment Nexus from the popular SciFi novel "Don't Create the Torment Nexus".

I guess in the end this kind of thing is OK if it's used respectfully. Even a simple photo of a deceased person can be used in a disrespectful manner if someone really wants to.
 
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