Larimer County Genealogical Society

Online Immortality: Microsoft Patent Details Tech That Could Turn Dead People Into AI Chatbots

An Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot that lets you interact with dead loved ones sounds like something straight out of science fiction. But if technology in a patent granted to Microsoft comes to fruition, interacting with a chatty 3D digital version of the deceased could one day become de rigueur.

The patent, titled ‘Creating a conversational chatbot of a specific person,” details a system that would access images, voice data, social media posts, electronic messages and the like to “create or modify a special index in the theme of the specific person’s personality.” In some cases, images and video could be used to create a 3D model of the person for extra realism.

It’s an especially provocative notion when you consider the patent’s suggestion that the tech “may correspond to a past or present entity.

You can read more in an article by Leslie Katz in the C|Net web site at: http://cnet.co/3iSbqEf.

It sounds a bit creepy to me! Then again, if someone could set up a chatbot of my great-great-grandfather, I have a few questions I’d like to ask him!