Amazon’s Alexa can now mimic the voice of your dead relatives

In today’s totally dystopian technology news, Alexa will be able to start speaking with the voices of the dead, Amazon has said.

The voice assistant will be able to channel dead people and speak as they would, the company detailed, revealing that the feautre will be unveiled in a forthcoming update.

Amazon noted that having Alexa speak that way would not “eliminate [the] pain of loss”, but they hoped the new Alexa voices would “make their memories last”, pointing to the pandemic and the fact that “so many of us have lost someone we love”.

The feature requires only a minute of recorded audio to be fed into the system. Artificial intelligence can then use that recording to construct a whole voice, said Rohit Prasad, Amazon’s head scientist for Alexa AI. 

Amazon did not say when the feature would arrive with customers, or state definitively that it would be rolled out to the public at all. But in their announcement, they appeared to show the feature working, channelling the voice of a seemingly dead grandmother so that it could read to a child.

Such technologies have received considerable criticism from the public, who have frequently called them creepy or deceptive. Amazon’s new tool was met with similar fears as Black Mirror trended on Twitter as people compared it to the sci-fi series.