Amazon is working on giving Alexa the ability to mimic anyone's voice, dead or a...

• An Amazon executive said his team has been teaching Alexa to mimic voices with short audio clips.

• The capability can help people remember loved ones who died from COVID-19, the exec said.

• Many Twitter users have voiced concern over potential abuses of the technology.

Amazon is teaching Alexa to mimic anyone's voice, dead or alive, from just a one-minute recording of that voice.

Rohit Prasad, Amazon's head scientist for Alexa, said at a live event on Wednesday that his team has been instructing Alexa to pick up a voice from a short audio clip and convert it into longer audio output. Prasad was presenting at Amazon's re:Mars conference in Las Vegas.

He showed a short video of how people could use Alexa's voice-changing capability in real life. In the clip, a boy asks: "Alexa, can grandma finish reading me the Wizard of Oz?"

The smart speaker confirmed the request in its default chirpy voice, then transitioned to a less robotic voice that narrated an excerpt from the children's novel.

"This required inventions where we had to learn to produce a high-quality voice with less than a minute of recording versus hours of recording in the studio. The way we made it happen is by framing the problem as a voice-conversion task and not a speech generation path," Prasad said.

Prasad said Alexa's ability to impersonate familiar voices is particularly crucial now, as many people lost loved ones to COVID-19.

"While AI can't eliminate that pain of loss it can definitely make their memories last," he said.

Prasad did not say when Amazon would introduce Alexa's voice-imitation capability to the public. An Amazon spokesperson declined Insider's request for comment.

Alexa's ability to mimic voices is a form of artificial intelligence (AI) that Prasad called "generalizable intelligence." The ability helps Alexa adapt to different situations and acquire new knowledge from the experiences with little supervision, he said.

It's different from the "all-knowing, all-capable" artificial general intelligence, or AGI, that aims to understand human tasks and intellect to solve problems, said Prasad. Organizations including Google's DeepMind and Elon Musk's OpenAI are both focused on perfecting AGI.