Soon we’ll be able to see, hear and talk to long-gone friends and relatives if a recently disclosed Microsoft patent comes to fruition. The company has been granted permission to make chatbots using the digital information of deceased people.
A chatbot would consist of 3D motion images complete with realistic voice reconstruction. It would portray the person’s distinct personality traits using a trove of the individual’s communications on social media platforms.
Joseph Johnson Jr. and Dustin Abramson of Microsoft filed the patent titled “Creating a Conversational Chat Bot of a Specific Person” in 2017, and it was finally approved this month.
The patent states:
The specific person [who the chatbot represents] may correspond to a past or present entity (or a version thereof), such as a friend, a relative, an acquaintance, a celebrity, a fictional character, a historical figure, a random entity, etc. The specific person may also correspond to oneself (e.g., the user is creating/training the chatbot.
That last bit implies that living users could train a digital replacement in the event of their death.
According to Techxplorer, the patent goes on to explain that:
The chatbot could use information gathered from social media posts, images, voice data, electronic messages, written letters, and other personal data provided by the individual or others acting on the individual’s behalf to converse and interact in the personality of the specific person.
Users could chat with the departed over a cellphone, desktop computer, or personal assistants such as Alexa or Siri. They could call to say they love them or even ask questions about momentous events in their lives. If the chatbot doesn’t have any concrete data stored about a question asked, then AI and machine-learning processes would tap in to construct a logical and likely response.
Eventually, when more sophisticated models debut, users will be able to speak to a person at different ages – as a young adult about to start their life or a senior citizen reflecting on their life.
Microsoft did not invent the concept of bringing the dead to digital life. Michael Jackson “performed” five years after his death at the 2014 Billboard Music Awards thanks to emerging holographic technology. An episode of Netflix’s Black Mirror featured a young woman who uses a service to scrape data of her deceased partner from the internet to create a chatbot and, eventually, a robot. Last year, Kanye West bought Kim a hologram of her late father, Robert Kardashian, that spoke to her for around three minutes.
However, Microsoft’s proposal differs from those examples as it’s the first time a bot would be equipped with information harvested from social media data. The idea is likely to raise ethical issues – it’ll surely be a topic in future news.
