Amazon’s Alexa can replicate the voice of family members – even if they’re dead.

In this video, "Aneeq Dholakia,co-founder of Edyst, talks about Amazon's voice assistant. How Alexa is being trained on the voices of celebrities and other deceased individuals to offer users the option of interacting with famous voices and their deceased loved one's through Amazon Echo devices. He also talks about ethical implications of using the voices of deceased individuals in this way, as well as the potential for misuse of the technology.

Amazon Alexa & Echo Standard - What are they?

Amazon Alexa is a virtual assistant developed by Amazon, that is capable of voice interaction, music playback, setting alarms, providing weather and other real-time information, and controlling various smart devices. Alexa is designed to be able to understand and respond to a wide range of voice commands and questions, and can perform a variety of tasks for you, such as answering questions, playing music, setting reminders, and controlling smart home devices.

The Echo is a line of smart speakers developed by Amazon, which are designed to work with Alexa. The Echo Standard is a model in the Echo line of smart speakers. It is a compact speaker that is designed to be placed in a room, and can be controlled using voice commands. The Echo Standard is equipped with a number of sensors, including a microphone and a speaker, which allow it to pick up and respond to voice commands. It is also equipped with Bluetooth connectivity, which allows it to connect to and control other smart devices in your home.

We can use Alexa to control our smart devices through voice commands, we just need to do the following to do this:

1. Set up an Amazon account if you don't already have one.
2. Purchase an Amazon Echo device, or another device that is compatible with Alexa (such as a smart speaker or smart display).
3. Connect your Echo device to a power source and follow the instructions to set it up. This may involve connecting it to your Wi-Fi network and downloading the Alexa app on your phone or tablet.
4. Connect your smart devices to your home Wi-Fi network, if they are not already connected.
5. In the Alexa app, go to the "Devices" tab and select the device you want to control. Follow the instructions to add it to your Alexa account and set it up for voice control.
6. Once your smart device is set up, you can control it using voice commands with Alexa. For example, you can say "Alexa, turn on the lights" to turn on a smart light, or "Alexa, play music on Pandora" to play music on a smart speaker.
   

What are Alexa Skills (Apps)?

Alexa Skills are like apps for Amazon's virtual assistant, Alexa. They allow you to extend the functionality of your Echo device and customize it to suit your needs and interests. There are thousands of Skills available in the Alexa Skills store, covering a wide range of categories such as music, news, games, productivity, and more.

To use a Skill, you first need to enable it on your Alexa device. This can be done by searching for the Skill in the Alexa app or by asking Alexa to "enable" the Skill by name. Once a Skill is enabled, you can access it by saying the appropriate voice command. For example, if you have enabled a Skill called "Daily News Brief," you can say "Alexa, open Daily News Brief" to hear a summary of the day's news.

Some Skills are free to use, while others require a subscription or one-time purchase. You can browse and search for Skills in the Alexa app or on the Amazon website.

How did Alexa learn to mimic celebrities' voices?

Alexa has learned to speak like celebrities through the use of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms and machine learning techniques.

What Amazon did is, it trained the Alexa on a large dataset of recorded speech and then applied this training to allow the Alexa to mimic its speech. The approach, although quite complex, expensive to execute, requires specialized knowledge and resources to implement; but still worth the effort.

Amazon has developed the ability to mimic celebrity voices & the most famous celebrity from Bollywood is “Amitabh Bachchan” whose voice people are using to interact with Alexa. To teach this skill to Alexa, Amazon used several hours of audio to train its AI, but recently something has changed; Amazon has enhanced its AI to be able to create celebrity voices with just a few minutes of audio.

How did Amazon train Alexa to mimic any human voice within minutes?

In this case, apart from AI and ML technology, Amazon used speech synthesis software, it allowed Alexa to produce speech by combining pre-recorded sound samples and with less data. It allowed Alexa to produce a wider range of speech sounds and to speak in multiple languages.  This is done by using deep learning algorithms to analyze and replicate the voice.

What Amazon is doing next to increase the popularity and usefulness of Alexa.

Amazon is working on creating voices for deceased celebrities, using audio recordings and machine learning techniques. This will enable Alexa to mimic the voices of deceased individuals' voices without their consent and has potential implications for the entertainment industry, such as the creation of virtual performances.

Amazon is also working on improving the capabilities of Alexa, such as by adding more natural language processing and by expanding the range of tasks it can perform.

In summary: The use of AI and machine learning is becoming increasingly common in the tech industry. These technologies have the potential to revolutionize various fields, but also raise ethical concerns that need to be considered. However, this technology is still in the early stages of development and is not yet widely available.