Design, Science and Technology

Those weird “loved ones come back from the dead to visit you” stunts pulled by celebrities like Kanye West may soon become a reality through your digital assistant.

At Amazon’s re:MARS conference, the company announced it’s working on a feature that can synthesize short audio clips of a person’s voice and then reprogram it as longer speech. Amazon’s Senior Vice President and Head Scientist for Alexa, Rohit Prasad, showed off a demonstration where, as TechCrunch described, “the voice of a deceased loved one (a grandmother, in this case), is used to read a grandson a bedtime story.”

 

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Read the full article at: gizmodo.com

For better or worse, a new technology is making its way from consumers' homes into America's classrooms: voice-controlled "smart speaker" systems from companies such as Amazon and Google.

The internet-enabled devices listen to what users say, send audio recordings to the cloud, translate that information into commands, and respond accordingly—providing users with a personal digital voice assistant such as Amazon's Alexa, which teachers are now using to help with everything from setting a classroom timer to leading a group of 3rd graders through a spelling test.

Groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union are raising alarms about privacy.

"Should students be required to submit themselves to always-on voice-tracking and other third-party surveillance in order to get an education?" asked ACLU staff technologist Daniel Kahn Gillmor in an interview. 

Still, the early K-12 adopters of smart speakers and digital voice assistants are generally enthusiastic.