Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being used by a bereaved family in Taiwan to honor their late daughter.
Tino Bao, a well-known music producer in Taiwan, told ABC News that he had created an AI chatbot for his deceased daughter Felicity.
His daughter passed away back in 2021 after a very long battle with a rare blood disease. Bao and his wife are devastated about what happened to her.
While pursuing a PhD in AI, the music producer used the field of generative AI as a way to process his loss.
He has since created an interactive chatbot with his late daughter’s memories, resurrecting her via AI.
Bao mentioned that the chatbot resembles his daughter’s personality. He emphasized that he doesn’t like the term “resurrection” in referring to what he had created.
“Impossible resurrection. Impossible,” he stated.
When asked how he would describe it, he said that it’s more like “rebuilding” rather than resurrecting.
Over the course of a year, AI Felicity was painstakingly rebuilt. In order to create a memory bank for the AI, he gathered notes from all of Felicity’s closest friends and family members as well as from her social media posts.
From the information he had gathered, Bao used that to create her voice and placed it in the memory bank.
Her voice had to be recreated as during her illness, she lost her ability to speak. The only recording of her voice that is usable is a video that she sent to her mom years ago.
Using that as a starting point, he replicated her speech, even modifying her Chinese pronunciation to incorporate a Canadian accent.
The chatbot was considered a success after his wife had recognized Felicity’s voice from the other room.
Rebuilding her voice, Bao composed a birthday greeting for his spouse.
This has now been becoming a big business as there is an online shopping site in China that offers a wide range of options, bringing back AI versions of deceased loved ones and has been booming since the pandemic.
Now that he is working on a company to provide comfort to other families, Bao acknowledges that only immediate family members should have access to it.
He knows fully well that this voice is not his daughter’s and that she is not coming back, for now at least it eases his heartbreak.
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