Alexa, wake the dead

Amazon just announced that they’ve developed a way for Alexa to speak in the voice of dead relatives. They shared a video of the voice assistant reading a bedtime story to a child, using the voice of their deceased grandmother.

Most people seem to agree that this is creepy, but it actually has me noticing things I do that aren’t so different. Watching tapes of passed relatives, listening to recorded conversations with dead family members, and staring at photographs of people no longer with me. These are all ways that I’m using technology to keep people from disappearing.

Even the act of learning my family’s languages is essentially a drawn-out grieving process. It feels good to hear and speak these languages because it reminds me of them. So I ask myself what’s so different about AI speaking in their voice? It’s difficult to explain why this specific use of technology seems to cross the line of acceptable ways to grieve. It’s initially easy to write it off as being wrong because it’s Amazon, but I wouldn’t feel too different even if this was developed for non-commercial purposes.

I can’t explain why the use of technology in this way feels wrong, but it does prove to me that there’s something special about hearing language and how it allows us to keep ancestors alive.