‘Mimicking voices to create memories’: Amazon working to upgrade Alexa

CHENNAI: Alexa is Amazon's cloud-based speech service. This voice-controlled “personal assistant” can perform various tasks and can control systems. In a recent conference held in Las Vegas on Wednesday, the company revealed its new project on upgrading Alexa.

Amazon is developing a system to let Alexa mimic any voice after hearing less than a minute of audio, said Rohit Prasad, an Amazon Senior Vice President, at the conference. For instance, customers will be able to personalise Alexa, to sound exactly like the person they want.

Prasad stated that Amazon wants Alexa to have "generalisable intelligence," or the flexibility to adjust to user environments and acquire new ideas without much external intervention. The objective is to "make the memories last" after "so many of us have lost someone we love" during the pandemic. He also said that the objective is "not to be confused with the all-knowing, all-capable, uber artificial general intelligence," or AGI, which Alphabet's DeepMind unit and Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI are pursuing.

Amazon also presented its plans for Alexa to aid as a companion. In a video segment, it portrayed a child who asked, "Alexa, can grandma finish reading me the Wizard of Oz?"

After a brief pause, Alexa confirmed the order and modified its voice. Alexa sounded more like the person's grandmother in real life as it spoke comfortingly and less robotically.