- A company called Life’s Echo is using AI and in-depth interviews to create interactive simulations of people when they pass away.
- They clone your voice to make effective ‘digital ghosts’ full of information about your life.
- Post-death AI mimics are slowly becoming more prevalent, but Life’s Echo is more comprehensive than most.
Imagine going to a family reunion and reminiscing about a loved one who has passed away, only for someone to open an app to reveal an AI-fueled replica of the departed you can have a conversation with.
You ask about their childhood, first job, or their emotions on their wedding day, and they answer correctly, in their own voice and words. That’s the vision of a new company called Life’s Echo, which offers a suite of AI tools to enable you to produce a digital ghost of yourself capable of conversing with your loved ones after you’ve died.
Life’s Echo is designed to capture the essence of who you are before you shuffle off this mortal coil. The idea is that your stories, voice, and personality don’t have to vanish. Instead, they can be preserved in a digital format with which your friends and family can interact, even when you’re long gone. It’s a way to keep a version of you alive – in the most uncanny valley way possible.
Here’s how it works: you sit down with an AI interviewer named Sarah, who conducts five 45-minute interviews. Sarah asks about your childhood, family, career, love life – all the big stuff. She digs deep with over 1,000 questions in her database, encouraging you to share your most personal stories and details. These interviews are casual and conversational, almost like therapy, but with a digital afterlife twist.
Once the sessions are complete, the conversations are transcribed, and the AI builds a unique model of you. It’s not just a recording; it’s a digital clone of your voice, stories, and personality. This is your “AI Echo.” Your family members can then ask this AI version of you questions, and it will respond with answers drawn from the life stories you provided. Imagine your daughter, decades from now, asking, “How did you feel when I was born?” and your AI Echo delivering a heartfelt answer as if you were right there.
AI tools like Character.AI have enticed users by offering to simulate the personalities of current and historical celebrities. Then, there are AI voice cloning tools like ElevenLabs and Respeecher that have demonstrated that AI can mimic people’s voices incredibly well. At the same time, MyHeritage turns old still photos into moving videos. But Life’s Echo is going for something deeper.
“Like most people, I am familiar with the lives of my parents and grandparents but I know nothing about my great grandparents. After three generations, knowledge of our existence almost completely vanishes,” CEO Ruth Endacott said. “Life’s Echo will help to preserve a lasting record that allows future generations to engage with and learn intimate and very important details about our lives, key experiences, and perspectives.”
AI Eternity
Ruth co-founded Life’s Echo with her husband, Steve Endacott. Appropriately, Steve Endacott is already known for his efforts to bring AI into the public sphere thanks to creating “AI Steve,” the UK’s first AI candidate for Parliament.
The sentiment behind Life’s Echo is touching and could be very heartwarming for the right people. But, it’s undeniably an eerie concept too. Picture your virtual self relying on those interviews to convey who you were and what you were like to people who won’t be born for a long time. It’s uncomfortable to envision your voice, your memories, and your personality all distilled into an algorithm available for a posthumous chat at any time.
But, if you’re really into the idea, you can use the same AI tools and interviews to produce a personalized autobiography for your funeral, record your own eulogy to be delivered by the AI version of yourself, and even a whole script for the person running the funeral based on your stories and preferences. It’s like having a ghostwriter who knows precisely what you’d want said at your send-off.
Of course, this isn’t the first time tech has tried to offer a digital afterlife. Other services, like Eternos and Project Lazarus, have explored similar ideas, where AI models of deceased loved ones can answer questions and share memories. But Life’s Echo goes beyond them with the voice mimicry and depth of its interviews.
There are other questions, of course. Even if you like the idea, will talking to a digital version of a loved one help people grieve, or will it keep them stuck in the past? How do you explain it to kids? And if your AI Echo exists in the cloud, who controls it after you’re gone? Regardless of whether you’re curious or queasy imagining it, you may be having conversations with deceased loved ones before you know it.