“One thing that surprised me the most about Alexa is the companionship relationship we have with it,” said Prasad, Alexa AI SVP and head scientist. “Human attributes of empathy and affect are key for building trust. They have become even more important in these times of the ongoing pandemic, when so many of us have lost someone we love. While AI can’t eliminate that pain of loss, it can definitely make their memories last.” Generating a voice like this presents a technical challenge, Prasad explained in his remarks, because it requires producing a high-quality voice with less than a minute of recording, versus hours of recording a voice in a studio. Prasad’s team addressed the challenge as a voice conversion task rather than a speech generation task. “We are unquestionably living in the golden era of AI, where our dreams and science fiction are becoming a reality,” Prasad said. For instance, if a customer on Valentine’s Day says, “Alexa, I want to buy flowers for my wife,” Alexa could leverage world knowledge and temporal context to respond with, “Perhaps you should get her red roses.”
