Microsoft Patented A Chatbot That Lets You Communicate With Dead Relatives
Image via Shutterstock
The pandemic has proven that life can go on even from a distance, but virtual tools haven’t quite equipped us with all the things we wish to have. For one, humans still lack the ability to reach out to a loved one or celebrity who has passed over.
For a while, Microsoft dabbled with the idea of communicating with virtual copies of living or deceased people. A patent granted to the company by the US Patent and Trademark Office last month details a chatbot mimicking a “past or present entity… such as a friend, a relative, an acquaintance, a celebrity, a fictional character, a historical figure.”
The conversational tool would develop and “converse and interact in the personality” of a desired figure by studying their “social data,” like photos, voice clips, social media posts, and written letters, CNN reported. It could also generate a 2D or 3D avatar based on a person’s facial and voice recognition algorithms and data.
“Conversing in the personality of a specific person may include determining and/or using conversational attributes of the specific person, such as style, diction, tone, voice, intent, sentence/dialogue length and complexity, topic and consistency,” the document reads.
To respond to questions not answerable from the “social data,” the personalized chatbot could also be trained on other forms of information, like demographic details, interests, and opinions.
Microsoft has, however, stressed that it will not bring this concept to ideation. The patent was filed in 2017—before the company had a set of AI ethical guidelines in place.
Understandably, the proposed technology has caused some concern. In the past, attempts to virtually revive deceased actors like James Dean and Paul Walker had been met with a similar distaste.
Tim O’Brien, Microsoft’s general manager of AI programs, has also “confirmed that there’s no plan for this,” as on hindsight, the idea is “disturbing.”
The chatbot is also against the “AI ethics reviews we do today,” O’Brien adds. So, rest assured you won’t be seeing an AI psychic medium by Microsoft any time soon.
[via CNN, cover image via Shutterstock]
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