Microsoft has created a technology and filed a patent that might digitally reincarnate your dead ones as a chatbot.
The system will use social data like images, voice data, social media posts, electronic messages and written letters to create the digital profile of the person.
“The social data may be used to create or modify a special index in the theme of the specific person’s personality. The special index may be used to train the chatbot to converse and interact in the personality of a specific person.” reads the patent.
The chatbot can sound like a real person.
“In some aspects, the voice of the specific person will be generated using audio recordings and sound data related to the specific person.”
The 2D and 3D model of the specific person may be generated using images, depth information, or video data associated with the person.
Microsoft’s patent is not concerned about who might be chosen to be the subject of one of its chatbots, stating that the subject could be dead or alive.
“The specific person, who the chatbot represents, may correspond to a past or present entity, such as a friend, a relative, an acquaintance, a celebrity, a fictional character, a historical figure, a random entity etc.”
There is a possibility that people in future might train up digital version before they die, says the report.
If the chatbot doesn’t get enough input data to provide an answer on a specific topic, crowd-sourced conversational data will be used to fill in the gaps.
This option will give a lot of space for creativity. User can feed the data of their desire while training the chatbot systems.
The idea of reincarnating people as chatbots raise all manner of privacy implications that are not discussed in the patent, which is, by nature, concerned with the technical workings of the system.
