Amazon reveals disturbing new Alexa feature
Amazon recently unveiled a creepy new feature which would allow for its Alexa devices to speak in the voice of deceased relatives.
The virtual assistant would mimic the voice of any person based on less than a minute of audio recording.
The feature was presented during the company’s Re:Mars conference in Las Vegas, where Amazon’s senior vice president and head scientist for Alexa, Rohit Prasad presented a disturbing scenario.
A child is lying down and, instead of Alexa’s voice reading the book, it’s the kid’s grandma’s voice.
Amazon is working on a feature that lets Alexa mimic the voice of dead family members using short voice clips. Yeah, it can read you stories in Grandma’s voice. Would you wanna try it or too creepy?
Here’s a glimpse at how the feature works (source: Amazon re:MARS keynote) pic.twitter.com/zKjeIdcZkA
— Beebom (@beebomco) June 24, 2022
COVID-19 again the pretext
As has become the norm to implement just about any creepy kind of technology, almost like an automatic regurgitation, the feature is being justified due to COVID-19.
“These attributes have become even more important during the ongoing pandemic when so many of us have lost ones that we love,” Prasad said.
“While AI can’t eliminate that pain of loss, it can definitely make their memories last.”
Aside from the meaningless buzzwords, in reality it is yet another unnatural innovation which tries to mask over the real yet necessary human process of dealing with the occasionally harsh side of life, like overcoming loss.
It seems very much an intention of Big Tech to provide a constant ‘safety net’ to people – much like how it attempts to shield from ‘harmful’ information – and keeping everyone in an illusory loop of reality and fantasy.
As ever, Big Tech companies like Amazon sell such ‘innovative’ ideas with spurious justifications, yet little is said about the privacy and ethical concerns.
