Uhhh…what?!
This world is getting REAL nutty, man! Amazon’s virtual friend/assistant, Alexa, will pretty soon be able to read you stories using the voice of your dead loved ones.
At the re:Mars conference in Las Vegas, Amazon’s Senior Vice President, and Head Scientist for Alexa, Rohit Prasad updated us on the future of Alexa. One of those things was a new technology that only needed 60 seconds of someone’s voice (instead of hours with previous technology) to be able to produce much longer voice conversations. A video was played that showed a child in bed asking Alexa to have dead granny finish reading him The Wizard of Oz.
I’m pretty this is how horror movies start.
Part of the goal here is to preserve memories. I mean, I guess I get it, but…really? I’ve never heard a dead loved one’s voice before, but do I want to? I don’t know. That could get really freaky. Or really depressing. Or really comforting. I DON’T KNOW!
Listen, a lot can go wrong here. Maybe the audio gets manipulated or glitches and sweet old Grandma Gertrude sounds like Satan. Maybe Grandma starts randomly saying things unsolicited. Maybe she actually talks back to you like she’s trapped in your little hockey puck Echo Dot. Maybe, even better, Grandma still talks to you despite not being plugged in at all. I can’t stress this enough, but the last thing you want is old Gran Gran reading 50 Shades of Grey to you. (You DO however want Gilbert Gottfried reading it to you, though. 🤣 #RIP – watch here. NSFW)
I’ve seen enough movies to know that one of those things will definitely happen, if not every single one of them. If this isn’t a movie yet, I think I just came up with one. New movie idea, I call it! Dibs, it’s mine now.
