telecommunications
Samsung lets smartphones imitate users’ voices
A promotional room at the Samsung Electronics Co. headquarters in Seoul. photo
© -/YNA/dpa
The ideas are not new, but have not been able to gain acceptance so far. Now Samsung is trying again. If necessary, the mobile phone itself should make unpleasant phone calls that are deceptively real.
Samsung is experimenting with the ability to imitate the user’s voice on its smartphones. The function is initially only available in the home market of South Korea and only on the latest Galaxy S23 model, as the world’s largest smartphone provider announced on Wednesday. The voice generated by the computer can, for example, answer calls when you are unable or unwilling to speak.
The user can then type in their utterances as text for the software to read them aloud. This function is now also available in English, albeit without the voice imitation. Samsung also announced further improvements for its in-house language assistant Bixby on Wednesday, which is overshadowed by competing technology such as Google Assistant or Amazon’s Alexa.
The idea of letting the computer speak for itself on calls is not new. In 2018, for example, Google introduced a software called Duplex that could automatically book a hairdresser appointment or a restaurant reservation on behalf of the user and was indistinguishable from a human being. After criticism, it has not found any distribution so far.