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Imagined Conversations

Interesting and creepy idea about a chatbot that would allow you to speak to the deceased. Its not enough to had digitized just about everything that could be a live human, we need to now go to the other side and rouse the dead up as well. What would be more "useful" would be to have the memories of people stored away so we could recall the great grandmother's knowledge of the family tree, folk remedies and dessert recipes. Most of us have never met our but if they had vibrant personalities, you hear stories about them that fade away over time, with new generations knowing less and less about them. 

According to the patent information, the tool would cull "social data" such as images, social media posts, messages, voice data and written letters from the chosen individual. That data would be used to train a chatbot to "converse and interact in the personality of the specific person." It could also rely on outside data sources, in case the user asked a question of the bot that couldn't be answered based on the person's social data.

Too bad the dead cannot be left in peace anymore. We would harvest their digital remains to make something out of it. If we wanted the great grandfather dead in the 1920s to show up in my cousin R's  wedding video, maybe that could be arranged. I think of R in particular, because he is way younger than me, has parents who managed to estrange just about everyone they know. Now, with a wedding planned in the middle of a pandemic, just about no one will make it - they have the perfect excuse for bailing out now. Faking up a big fat Indian wedding with five hundred guests to include every branch and tendril of the extended family would be his mother's dream come true. To bad the technology is not quite ready yet. 

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