Now AI can keep you alive after you’re gone, and it’s just as creepy as it sounds
- A company called Life’s Echo uses AI and in-depth interviews to create interactive simulations of people as they die.
- They clone your voice to create effective ‘digital minds’ full of information about your life.
- AI after-death impersonations are slowly becoming more common, but Life’s Echo is more comprehensive than most.
Imagine going to a family reunion and reminiscing about a loved one who has passed away, only to have someone open an app to reveal an AI-powered replica of the deceased that you can have a conversation with.
You ask about their childhood, their first job or their emotions on their wedding day, and they answer correctly, in their own voice and words. That’s the vision of a new company called Life’s Echo, which offers a range of AI tools that let you create a digital ghost of yourself capable of talking to your loved ones after you die.
Life’s Echo is designed to capture the essence of who you are before you shed this mortal coil. The idea is that your stories, voice and personality don’t have to disappear. Instead, they can be saved in a digital format that allows your friends and family to communicate even when you are long gone. It’s a way to keep a version of you alive – in the creepiest way possible.
Here’s how it works: You sit down with an AI interviewer named Sarah, who conducts five 45-minute interviews. Sarah asks about your childhood, family, career, love life – all the important stuff. She digs deep with more than 1,000 questions in her database and encourages you to share your most personal stories and details. These interviews are informal and conversational, almost like therapy, but with a digital twist in the afterlife.
Once the sessions are completed, the conversations are transcribed and the AI builds a unique model of you. It’s not just a recording; it’s a digital clone of your voice, stories and personality. This is your ‘AI echo’. Your family members can then ask this AI version of you questions, and it will respond with answers from the life stories you provided. Imagine decades from now your daughter asks, “How did you feel when I was born?” and your AI echo will give a sincere response as if you were there.
AI tools like Character.AI have enticed users by offering to simulate the personalities of current and historical celebrities. Then there are AI voice cloning tools like ElevenLabs and Reply who have shown that AI can imitate human voices incredibly well. At the same time, MyHeritage turns old photos into moving videos. But Life’s Echo goes for something deeper.
“Like most people, I am familiar with the lives of my parents and grandparents, but I know nothing about my great-grandparents. After three generations, knowledge of our existence almost completely disappears,” said CEO Ruth Endacott. “Life’s Echo will help preserve a lasting record that will allow future generations to learn intimate and very important details about our lives, important experiences and perspectives.”
AI eternity
Ruth co-founded Life’s Echo with her husband, Steve Endacott. Appropriately enough, Steve Endacott is already known for his efforts to bring AI into the public sphere thanks to the creation of ‘AI Steve’, Britain’s first AI candidate for parliament.
The sentiment behind Life’s Echo is moving and can be very heartwarming for the right people. But it’s also undoubtedly a creepy concept. Imagine your virtual self relying on those interviews to convey who you were and what you were like to people far from being born. It’s uncomfortable to imagine your voice, your memories, and your personality, all distilled into an algorithm available for a posthumous chat at any time.
But if you really like the idea, you can use the same AI tools and interviews to produce a personalized autobiography for your funeral, record your own eulogy that can be spoken by the AI version of yourself, and even a whole script for the funeral. person who conducts the funeral based on your stories and preferences. It’s like having a ghostwriter who knows exactly what you want to say at your farewell.
Of course, this isn’t the first time technology has tried to offer a digital afterlife. Other services, such as Eternos and Project Lazarus, have explored similar ideas, where AI models of deceased loved ones can answer questions and share memories. But Life’s Echo goes further than that with the voice mimicry and the depth of the interviews.
There are of course more questions. Even if you like the idea, will talking to a digital version of a loved one help people grieve, or will it leave them stuck in the past? How do you explain it to children? And if your AI Echo is in the cloud, who will manage it when you’re gone? Regardless of whether you’re curious or nauseous when you imagine it, before you know it you may be having conversations with deceased loved ones.