Senior vice president and chief scientist for Alexa at Amazon recently demonstrated an in development feature that has some people concerned.

Voice cloning.

With less than one minute of recorded speech, the prototype Alexa can mimic any person's voice.

Such technology isn't new and has been commercially available for a long time but Alexa will make it a common household tool.

The implications for gaming are obvious.

We could be very near a point where games allow you to feed in your or anyone else's voice as the main character.

Through modding, whether officially supported or not by the developer, you could replace the voice of any other character.

And of course it's another piece of the puzzle for creating Star Trek style holodecks.

[ Main Image: In development Alexa with voice cloning. Credit: Amazon via YouTube. ]

References

AWS Events (June 23, 2022). Amazon re:MARS 2022 - Day 2 - Keynote. YouTube.

Palmai, Kitti (July 12, 2021). Voice cloning of growing interest to actors and cybercriminals. BBC News.

Paul, Maria (June 23, 2022). Alexa has a new voice — your dead relative’s. The Washington Post.

Plumb, Taryn (June 22, 2022). Amazon digs into ambient and generalizable intelligence at re:MARS. Venture Beat.