New AI Tools Let You Chat With Your Dead Relatives
New AI Tools Let You Chat With Your Dead Relatives
New products that let people keep relatives “alive” via AI are proliferating — offering, say, an interactive conversation with a recently departed dad who took the time to record a video interview before he passed.
Why it matters: As interest in genealogy and ancestry proliferates, these tools let families preserve memories and personal connections through generations — even giving children a sense of the physical presence of a relative who died before they were born.
The tools are also being used to record the memories of noteworthy people: celebrities, Holocaust survivors, etc.
The big picture: StoryFile is perhaps the most robust of a growing number of tools that help people create interactive digital memories of relatives. Many of them don’t require the relative to be alive during setup.
Amazon recently showed off an experimental Alexa feature that can read books aloud in the voice of a late relative, extrapolating from a snippet of that person’s recorded voice.
MyHeritage, the ancestry-tracing site, now offers “Deep Nostalgia,” a tool for animating old-timey photographs of your relatives.
HereAfter AI lets you record stories about yourself and pair them with photographs — so family members can ask you about your life and experiences.
Microsoft has obtained a patent to create “chatbots” that mimic individual people (dead or alive) based on their social media posts and text messages
Want to learn more about how StoryFile works and how memory-preservation programs “might change the way we collect history?