Bedtime stories are about to get more interesting for Amazon Alexa users. The company announced a new feature, “Create with Alexa” for its Echo Show devices.
The feature lets you, or your kids, create short animated stories that could soon replace flipping through pages trying to find the right story to knock your kid out.
Parents can create stories with their kids by saying “ Alexa, make a story” to kick things off. We foresee long nights filled with way too much excitement on this. Good luck.
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The feature uses conversational and generative artificial intelligence (AI) to create stories with colorful graphics, including illustrations, background music, and sound effects. We hope the latter will be soothing.
“A language model trained on written stories generates the text of the story. It is trained to build a cohesive story by generating text from just a few key inputs,” says Amazon.
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So far, Alexa has proved able to create narrated five to ten minutes stories in five scenes.
To keep things interesting, the retail giant says Create with Alexa will create a different story each time, even if the child uses the same prompts.
For now, stories can be saved on Echo Show devices’ media gallery. Amazon plans to add sharing support in case Alexa comes up with something particularly compelling.
The company says Create with Alexa is a family-friendly feature…in case you were worried about trusting AI with your kid’s brain just before bedtime.
South Africans will have to wait a bit longer for Create with Alexa. It is available in English in the US for now.