You Can Now Get Up Close & Personal With Albert Einstein’s Digital AI Recreation
Image via Digital Einstein Experience
A New Zealand- and Austin-based company has developed a digital version of Albert Einstein that you can talk to. The firm, UneeQ, teamed up with Hebrew University to recreate the physicist’s looks, voice, and mannerisms. Wolfram Research, creator of the WolframAlpha “computational intelligence” tool, lent its natural language engine and knowledge base to the project.
UneeQ is unveiling the bot to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s Nobel Prize in Physics. The goal of the project was to demonstrate that digital humans can provide companionship to those who are isolated, it told Fast Company.
While you may have some burning questions for the Nobel Prize winner, the digital recreation of Einstein isn’t designed for open-ended chats. He isn’t able to answer just any question, but seems to respond best to questions pertaining to the theory of relativity or about his early life.
As Fast Company interacted with Einstein, it found that he could only answer a narrow set of questions, and provided brief and shallow answers. When asked about his wife, Elsa, the digital version responded, “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to help you today. I am not connected to a service that allows you [to] connect with a real human just yet.”
Despite a few hiccups in conversation, one thing that stands out is the digital recreation’s lifelike features. And the look of the face is UneeQ’s main product. The company’s digital recreations are meant to provide a human front to its natural language processing engines, provided in some cases as cloud services from firms such as Microsoft and Amazon.
While it hasn’t perfected its digital recreations, the firm believes that conversations with digital humans will mark the next frontier in customer service interactions.
[via Fast Company, cover image via Digital Einstein Experience]
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