During Amazon's annual conference, re:Mars, Amazon's vice president and thailand cell phone database chief scientist for Alexa development, Rohit Prasad, demoed the new feature to the public. During the presentation, Amazon showed us how Alexa reads a story to a child in the voice of a grandmother — information about this for the first timeTechCrunchDistributed.
"We put a lot of effort into creating this feature. We had to create an algorithm that could mimic a voice even with a few minutes of recording, whereas before, this required hours of studio recordings. We used a voice transformation method to solve this problem," Rohit Prasad said at the conference.
Despite the moral side of such technology, Prasad says it is one of the best demonstrations of what artificial intelligence-based technologies can do.
According to Prasad, the digital grandmother awakening from eternal sleep is a great victory, he also noted that we are living in the golden age of artificial intelligence and what was once science fiction is now becoming a reality.
Gizmodo notes that this new feature for Amazon's Alexa isn't the first, and Japanese startup Takara Tomy has already created something similar. The Japanese company's device reads fairy tales to children in the voice of their parents.