Amazon.com Inc wants to give customers the chance to make Alexa, the company’s voice assistant, sound just like their grandmother — or anyone else.
The online retailer is developing a system to let Alexa mimic any voice after hearing less than a minute of audio, Amazon senior vice president Rohit Prasad said at a conference the company held in Las Vegas on Wednesday.
The goal is to “make the memories last” after “so many of us have lost someone we love” during the COVID-19 pandemic, Prasad said.
Amazon declined to say when it would roll out such a feature.
The work wades into an area of technology that has garnered close scrutiny for potential benefits and abuses. For instance, Microsoft Corp recently restricted which businesses could use its software to parrot voices. The goal is to help people with speech impairments or other problems, but some worry it could also be used to propagate political deepfakes.
Amazon hopes the project will help Alexa become ubiquitous in shoppers’ lives — but public attention has already shifted elsewhere.
At Alphabet Inc’s Google, an engineer made the highly contested claim that a company chatbot had advanced to sentience.
Another Amazon executive on Tuesday said that Alexa had 100 million customers globally, in line with figures the company has provided for device sales since January 2019.
Prasad said Amazon’s aim for Alexa is “generalizable intelligence,” or the ability to adapt to user environments and learn new concepts with little external input.
He said that goal 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-cofounded OpenAI are seeking.
Amazon shared its vision for companionship with Alexa at the conference. In a video segment, it portrayed a child who asked: “Alexa, can grandma finish reading me the Wizard of Oz?”
A moment later, Alexa affirmed the command and changed her voice. She spoke soothingly, less robotically, ostensibly sounding like the individual’s grandmother in real life.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
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