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Alexa’s New Trick Is Either Really Sweet or Really Creepy

Amazon says its new invention would allow someone’s dead grandma to read a bedtime story.

Amazon has announced new features for its Alexa device, including an artificial intelligence invention that can turn a 1-minute snippet of speech into a voice that can be used to say other things. According to TechCrunch, the example given was a dead grandmother reading a bedtime story—which sounds very... deep-fake. “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 the studio,” Rohit Prasad, senior vice president and head scientist for Alexa. “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 AI.”