In a demonstration video, a child said, “Alexa, can Grandma end up reading me the Wizard of Oz?” Alexa confirmed the request with the default, robotic voice and then immediately changed to a softer, more human tone, ostensibly mimicking the child’s family member. Alexa’s team has developed a model that allows its voice assistant to produce a high quality voice with “less than a minute of recorded audio,” Prasad said. While it could seemingly be used to reproduce any voice, Prasad suggested that it could be used to help remember a deceased family member. Making artificial intelligence conversational and companionship has become a key goal, especially since “so many of us have lost someone we love” during the Covid-19 pandemic, Prasad said. “While artificial intelligence can not eliminate this pain of loss, it can certainly make memories last,” he added. The e-commerce giant wants to make the conversation with Alexa more natural in general and has developed a number of features that allow its voice assistant to reproduce more human dialogues, even to the point of asking questions to the user.
