Oh, cool: Amazon says Alexa will soon be able to mimic the voices of your beloved dead

Our voices are like our lives: They echo, for a time, in a dark and mysterious chamber, and then one day vanish, consigning themselves forever to the void of the memory of those we loved, and then, eventually, to silence.

What a fucking bummer, huh?

Luckily, you’ll never have to worry about your own voice failing to survive you as a piece of proprietary corporate data ever again, because Amazon (Corporate slogan: “If it seems like something you’d see in a cheap-ass sci-fi satire of a dystopian future, we probably make it”) has announced that it’s working on a way to recreate the voices of the dead from just a minute or less of audio.

This is per our colleagues over at Gizmodo, who reported this week on a new project discussed today at Amazon’s re:MARS conference, which touts itself as one of the premiere places on the planet where you can pay $1,500 to attend and hear somehow wax lyrical about how cool it’d be if your dead wife’s voice could remind you that you’re almost out of Tide Pods. Specifically, we’re highlighting some words from Amazon’s Senior Vice President and Head Scientist for Alexa, Rohit Prasad, who spoke glowingly of an in-development technology where the company’s Alexa “virtual assistant/digital phylactery” device could be fed a few snippets of basically anyone’s voice and then begin speaking in it.

Amazingly, the whole “resurrect the people you once loved as horrifying audio puppets” thing isn’t even us jumping to the worst conclusion inherent here: Prasad floated that particular idea himself, positing a future whose grim blueprints were already sketched by the vocal ghost of Anthony Bourdain, dozens of absurd celebrity holograms, and that service that had that guy addicted to talking to a chatbot based on his dead fiancée. It’s dark, is all we’re saying, and no degree of “Wouldn’t you want your kids to have a bedtime story read to them by your dead mom’s voice?” wistful questioning is going to make it less dark. (And that’s before you get into the 8 million security issues that letting people easily spoof each other’s voices would potentially open up.)

Anyway, tune in to re:MARS later this week, when they roll out, we don’t know, a drone that’ll wire up your dead loved ones’ bones and make them dance for you, maybe play a jaunty little tune on their ribcage like a xylophone. That’ll be fun, right? That’s the future we all fucking want?