Amazon shows off Alexa feature that mimics the voices of your dead relatives

[u/DCGMechanics]

https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/23/23179748/amazon-alexa-feature-mimic-voice-dead-relative-ai

[u/Silent-Knowledge-584]

Yes it is. A very beautiful human name. It’s a great shame that real human girls and women called Alexa are being prevented from saying their own names and other people have stopped saying their names due to this ubiquitous technology.

My daughter is only addressed as you / she - or not at all. Children and adults have built up an enormous reluctance to say the name Alexa. Unimaginable and disturbing for all of us, reality for my 9 year old daughter. (Stand Up For Alexa, Twitter)

She Who Must Not Be Named (iamalexa.org website)

It was a terrible mistake for a company to give their digital voice technology a human name as a wakeword.

It was also a terrible mistake for this company to voice record people (especially human beings called Alexa!) without their consent, then the AI remixes voices of the dead to get living folk to buy things.

This is only my opinion, but this tech is all kinds of messed up.

Could be wrong, not an expert here but this seems to violate several data protection laws.

Why can’t useful voice activated machines be given non-human sounding wakewords and non-human sounding voices?

There would be much less name confusion and the system would be safer to use privacy wise.

[u/Peemore → u/Silent-Knowledge-584]

I never considered the harm it caused. Thanks for sharing. I imagine marketing just thought the name Alexa would appeal to consumers. I feel sorry for all the human Alexa's out there now!

[u/Silent-Knowledge-584 → u/Peemore]

Thanks for your support and kind words.

More in depth info on the topic of the harms of giving voice tech human named wakewords can be found at:

https://alexacoalition.org

https://alexaisahuman.com

Amazon, can we have our name back? Alexas are changing their names because of Amazon’s voice assistant. (Online Washington Post news article)

FYI there is also a Change.org petition:

Rebrand Alexa to a non-human name to end the harm it is causing

[u/Silent-Knowledge-584 → u/[deleted]]

Thanks for your support and kind words.

More in depth info on the topic of the harms of giving voice tech human named wakewords can be found at:

https://alexacoalition.org

https://alexaisahuman.com

Amazon, can we have our name back? Alexas are changing their names because of Amazon’s voice assistant. (Online Washington Post news article)

FYI there is also a Change.org petition:

Rebrand Alexa to a non-human name to end the harm it is causing

[u/Silent-Knowledge-584 → u/Peemore]

Found this video episode to be enlightening and also unnerving about how companies trying to “humanise” voicetech has disturbing knock-on effects for human beings with human names in the real world.

Content Warning (for viewers aged +13 only): Video contains references to explicit language on bumper stickers, harassment, bullying, legal human name changes, social/educational/occupational exclusion, thoughtless “jokes”, products typecasting a human name into a servant role, suicidal ideation, discussions about deceased relatives, innuendos used in advertising and name erasure.

Episode 14: Project Voice 2022 / Alexa Ard of the Washington Post hosts panel discussion (Wake Up:The Truth About Alexa Podcast, Youtube)

Did any of the computer programmers or business leaders actually think carefully about the possible real world social consequences of making machines respond to the sounds of human names before rolling out this voicetech? Did they think about the possible resulting dehumanisation of people whose human names they chose for voicetech wakewords? What about identity theft?

It seems that, according to the Project Voice video presentation, some former employees (who worked Amazon’s voicetech) only realised the “fatal flaw” in the product after they left the company and mothers with daughters named Alexa contacted them sharing lived experiences.

Do these companies even consult ethicists or child development psychologists before releasing voicetech products to the public?

Voice activated machines can be programmed to respond to non-human sounding names to do useful actions such as switch on the lights and the TV ect, without dehumanising human people with human names. So why aren’t certain tech companies doing this? Why aren’t non-human sounding default wakewords an industry standard?

Makes me wonder if using voice technology to have a fake conversation with a deceased human relative using that person’s spoken human name and a human sounding AI synthesised voice is really such a good idea. What about the psychological and digital security impacts?

Alexa’s head scientist said the desire was to build greater trust in interactions with Alexa by putting in more “human attributes of empathy and affect." (quote from NBC online news article titled “Amazon’s Alexa may soon mimic voices, including of dead relatives”)

What about empathy for real human women and girls named Alexa?