Dadbot

THE FACEBOOK MESSENGER CHATBOT SPEAKING WITH A VOICE FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE.

James Vlahos, it seems, is going through a stage of grief that Ross and Kessler never could have imagined — creating a chatbot of your deceased loved one. ‘Tis I, the Beloved and Noble Father!’ were the first words the Dadbot uttered, but rather than being an uploaded conscience-style AI like what we saw in the movie Transcendence (saw and didn’t overly enjoy), this chatbot is an amalgamation of 12 hours of transcribed recorded dialogue between James and his now-deceased father. Those 90,000 words were then fed into PullString, a program designed to create chatbots, and from that, Dadbot emerged. While James can now hold a conversation with the Dadbot, he admits that it’s far from perfect and that “it’s not nearly so good that it’s creepy.” Well, that’s good. Right?