Do you believe in the afterlife? I do, and it’s not a place that you can buy yourself into.

Everyone dies and there’s nothing that we can do to bring them back. But Amazon isn’t going to let that stop them from trying.

Well, apparently, they’re rolling out a new technology that will allow your Alexa device to sound like your deceased relatives.

The new technology was unveiled last week during Amazon’s re:MARS AI conference, where tech enthusiasts gathered to see what the “brightest minds in science” have been up to lately.

When it came time to present, Amazon’s senior vice president and head scientist for Alexa, Rohit Prasad, introduced the company’s latest development — a way to change Alexa’s voice from drab to dead through vocal mimicking based on recordings less than a minute long.

He then tugged at the audience’s heartstrings further with a video featuring a small child asking Alexa if Grandma could finish reading him the The Wizard of Oz. The technology obliged, reading the rest of the book in a voice mimicking the presumably no-longer-with-us grandmother.

Amazon just revealed a new Alexa feature that can learn to mimic the voices of dead relatives with less than a minute of recordings 🙀 pic.twitter.com/7UojMTEPdm

— Product Hunt 😸 (@ProductHunt) June 23, 2022

Here’s the problem I see with this. I think it will create a false sense of relationship and comfort. We already see people who marry inanimate objects because they “fall in love”. This will likely only encourage this sort of behavior more.

But I do understand how this would be a temporarily enjoyable thing as long as you don’t grow so attached that it becomes toxic. I’m sure that people would just want to hear their loved one’s voice one more time. In life, we are meant to let go of those loved ones that have passed away. I know it’s not easy, but we have to accept that it’s part of life no matter how hard it is.

I know several people who are basically addicted to dead family members and others who just can’t let go of deceased friends. They have become codependent to a degree.

That is why as a Christian, I can acknowledge the difficulty of losing a loved one. I’ve lost people in life myself, but I know that I will see them again. That’s not just a hope or a wish or a good thought, I’m thoroughly convinced through evidence that this is a reality and in that I find comfort.

Sources:
Ripley’s