The ‘Dead Grandma’ Voice From Amazon’s Alexa Is Just The Beginning Of A Truly Creepy End Times Trend Of Deepfake Audio Of Your Deceased Loved Ones

August 9, 2022 admin News 0

Whether or not you like the idea of ‘Dead Grandma’ Alexa, the demo highlights how quickly A.I. has impacted text-to-speech, and suggests that convincingly human fake voices could be a lot closer than we think.

Gone are the days where you could mention stuff from the book of Revelation, and absolutely no one outside of your Bible study group knew what you were talking about. Now when you talk about news and current events with strangers on the street, their response is invariably “dude, isn’t that just like what Revelation says?” So who wants to install an AI bot-powered digital assistant like Alexa in your home, and have it speak to your children in the voice of their beloved, but sadly, dead grandma? Count me out, man, like way out.

“And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.” Revelation 13:15 (KJB)

Back in the mid-1990’s, me and a group of friends started our own Bible study, and it lasted for a little under 7 years, and we got a solid grounding in understanding prophecy. But as I recall, just about everything related to prophecy hadn’t yet arrived, there were harbingers for sure, but little else. Here in 2022, we are surrounded by prophetic fulfillment from cryptocurrency, biometric clothing, AR and VR in the Metaverse, to implantable digital identification and global government injections of gene editing technology. Stay the course, Christian, our flight leaves sooner than you think. Make sure you’ve ‘fulfilled your course’ before takeoff time.

Why Amazon’s ‘dead grandma’ Alexa is just the beginning for deepfake audio voice cloning

FROM FAST COMPANY: Earlier this summer, at the re:MARS conference—an Amazon-hosted event focusing on machine learning, automation, robotics, and space—Rohit Prasad, head scientist and vice president of Alexa A.I., aimed to wow the audience with a paranormal parlor trick: speaking with the dead. “While A.I. can’t eliminate that pain of loss, it can definitely make their memories last,” he said, before showing a short video that starts with an adorable boy asking Alexa, “Can Grandma finish reading me The Wizard of Oz?”

The woman’s voice that reads a few sentences from the book sounds grandmother-y enough. But without knowing Grandma, it was impossible to evaluate the likeness. And the whole thing struck many observers as more than a little creepy—Ars Technica called the demo “morbid.” But Prasad’s revelation of how the “trick” was performed was truly gasp-worthy: Amazon scientists were able to summon Grandma’s voice based on just a one-minute audio sample. And they can easily do the same with pretty much any voice, a prospect that you may find exciting, terrifying, or a combination of both.

The fear of “deepfake” voices capable of fooling humans or voice-recognition technology is not unfounded—in one 2020 case, thieves used an artificially generated voice to talk a Hong Kong bank manager into releasing $400,000 in funds before the ruse was discovered. At the same time, as voice interactions with technology become more common, brands are eager to be represented by unique voices. And consumers seem to want tech that sounds more human (although a Google voice assistant that imitated the “ums,” “mm-hmms” and other tics of human speech, though, was criticized for being too realistic).

That’s been driving a wave of innovation and investment in A.I.-powered text-to-speech (TTS) technology. A search on Google Scholar shows more than 20,000 research articles on text-to-speech synthesis published since 2021. Globally, the text-to-speech market is projected to reach $7 billion in 2028, up from about $2.3 billion in 2020, according to Emergen Research.

Today, the most widespread use of TTS is in digital assistants and chatbots. But emerging voice-identity applications in gaming, media, personal communication, are easy to imagine: custom voices for your virtual personas, text messages that read out in your voice, voiceovers by absent (or deceased) actors. The metaverse is also changing the way we interact with technology.

“There are going to be a lot more of these virtualized experiences, where the interaction is less and less a keyboard, and more about speech,” says Frank Chang, a founding partner at A.I.-focused venture fund Flying Fish in Seattle. “Everyone thinks of speech recognition as the hot thing, but ultimately if you’re talking to something, don’t you want it to just talk back to you? To the extent that that can be personalized—with your voice or the voice of somebody you want to hear—all the better.” Providing accessibility for people with vision challenges, limited motor function, and other cognitive issues is another factor driving development of voice-tech, notably for e-learning.

Whether or not you like the idea of “Grandma Alexa,” the demo highlights how quickly A.I. has impacted text-to-speech, and suggests that convincingly human fake voices could be a lot closer than we think. READ MORE

Amazon revealed Alexa feature that mimics the voices of your dead relatives

Amazon at the re:MARS conference has shows off an experimental Alexa feature that allows the AI assistant to mimic the voices of users’ dead relatives. Amazon has given no indication whether this feature will ever be made public.

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