Amazon is working on giving Alexa the ability to mimic anyone's voice, dead or alive, from just one minute of audio — and Twitter doesn't know how to feel about it

A one-minute recording of someone's voice is enough to teach Amazon's assistant to mimic someone's voice.

At a live event on Wednesday, the head scientist for Amazon's voice assistant said that his team has been instructing the device to pick up a voice from a short audio clip and convert it into longer audio. The conference was held in Las Vegas.

In the video he showed, people could use the voice-changing ability of the device. A boy wants to know if grandma can finish reading him the wizard of Oz.

The request was confirmed in the speaker's default chirpy voice, and then a less robotic voice narrated an excerpt from the book.

It required inventions where we had to learn to make a high-quality voice with less than a minute of recording. The problem was framed as a voice-conversion task and not a speech generation path.

As many people lost loved ones to COVID-19, the ability to impersonate familiar voices is especially important.

He said that the pain of loss can be alleviated by the use of artificial intelligence.

Amazon's voice-imitation capability will be introduced to the public, but it's not clear when that will happen. An Amazon spokesman refused to speak to Insider.

"Generalizable intelligence" is a type of artificial intelligence that is able to mimic voice sounds. He said that the ability helpsAlexa adapt to different situations and acquire new knowledge.

It's not the same as an artificial general intelligence that aims to understand human tasks to solve problems. Both DeepMind and Open Artificial Intelligence are focused on improving AGI.

There are other companies working on technology that can mimic human voices. Takara Tomy, a Japanese toy maker, created a device called Coemo that uses voice-recognition technology to read stories to children.

Many are spooked by AI's ability to imitate human functions

Some people were against Amazon's plan to teach its voice assistant to mimic humans.

A person using the handle "Maltese Mama" said that they could keep their parents away from dementia sufferers. "We have caregivers going daily but being able to peak in or even better drop in with a video call is amazing," they said.

Many people were concerned about the technology.

How soon will criminals be able to call your family members and ask for money? Ask them for social security numbers. A user with the handle bitty_in_ pink asked if it was bank information.

A person who goes by the name of "luke" said they were freaked out by it.

He wrote that he wouldn't do it for a circular device, but he would like to have one last conversation with his mother.

—Luke (@LukeyGearSolid) June 23, 2022

Artificial intelligence's ability to mimic human functions has been a concern for experts. Musk funded several artificial intelligence projects to make sure that they were only used for good. Earlier this month, an engineer claimed that a robot had become sentient, but artificial intelligence experts said it was not self-awareness.