A Lifelike Legacy
by Krishna Andavolu
OCTOBER 21, 2010 TAGS:
In the 1993 film My Life, Michael Keaton plays a terminally ill cancer patient who makes videos of himself for his unborn child. Anticipating that he won’t be around to offer fatherly advice, he creates instructional vignettes on topics ranging from handshake etiquette and stepfathers to the intricacies of changing motor oil. It’s an overly sentimental movie with some graceful moments. As a cultural artifact, however, it displays the use of a new technology (video cameras) for posthumous communication.
Don Davidson, CEO of the Huntsville, Alabama company Intellitar, thinks he can do one better. Intellitar launches the Virtual Eternity Service today, which creates a “digital image clone” of a user that can be interacted with in real time on the Internet even after the death of the clone’s creator.
“Think of leaving yourself as a legacy,” Davidson told me in a phone interview yesterday. Simultaneously, I was staring at Davidson’s Intellitar (as in intelligent avatar) on my computer screen. The digital clone was blinking and fidgeting like a person might if trapped in the staid position of a studio portrait. “How are you today?” it (he?) asked me, mimicking Davidson’s stately southern accent in clipped tones.
The idea, (the real) Davidson continued, is to create a fully interactive clone of a person so that generations of family members and friends can ask questions about the deceased’s life, seek advice or just relive the indescribable feeling of talking to a loved one face-to-face.
The conversational artificial intelligence technology, developed by New Jersey-based Cognitive Code Corporation, was originally intended for use in a customer service capacity. Upload a training manual or a set of frequently asked questions and the A.I. accesses the appropriate information when prompted by a text or spoken question.
Davidson and his business partner Mike Remus figured that adding vocal and animation components to that A.I. structure could help answer that universal question of mortality: What am I leaving behind. With Intellitar, you are leaving yourself behind. Or some simulacra.
Davidson envisions multiple generations of families creating Intellitars together and constructing living family trees (Intellitars can’t talk to one another yet, so don’t worry about family squabbles lasting into eternity). “Genealogy starts at a point in time and goes backwards. Why can’t it start at a point and go forwards?” he asks.
The process for creating an Intellitar is simple. First, upload a portrait-style photo. Make sure it’s flattering, because this photo will become you, forever. Next, either choose among a dozen or so stock voices or spend three hours recording over 1500 phrases and sentences (which get broken down into phonemes) to create a signature voice. At this point you have created your Intellitar’s shell.
Then, you take a forty-question personality test to determine whether you are an extroverted, introverted or neutral person.
Finally, upload your life history in the form of an autobiography or through important stories, anecdotes or lessons. Populate video and photo galleries, offer commentary, do whatever you want really. As Davidson puts it, “train your brain.”
Obviously, you would have to do this before you die. And so the Virtual Eternity Service is a creative way of writing your own obituary.
The visual accomplishment of an actual Intellitar lands somewhere between the uncanny valley and those silly Conan O’Brien bits. So it can be a bit comical and eerie to interact with one. But, these Intellitars do display a comforting spark of life, a way of interacting that flipping through a scrapbook or reading old letters would never provide.
When asked who this product might appeal to, Davidson immediately mentioned Baby Boomers, which seems a logical audience for this type of self-preservation or self-worship.
But perhaps Intellitar will jell when two near parallel trajectories of technology and living intersect.
The storehouse of data about a person’s life is expanding almost exponentially and is no longer contained solely in journals, letters or picturebooks. Similarly, A.I. and virtual imaging improve ever-rapidly.
So imagine, in fifty years, when Millennials have decades of Facebook status updates, Foursquare check-ins AIM chats and tweets on record. They could upload their every move, thought and action since becoming sentient beings into a three-dimensional and potentially tactile hologram. The bereft would never again have to say goodbye.
Would this be some kind of afterlife or a just a cruel eternal return?
Davidson shrugs at such heady concepts. He is bullish on a more retrospective tradition: the transference of knowledge and history not through ever expanding databases and search engines, but through conversation, dialogue, story telling. The oral tradition.
Krishna Andavolu is the Managing Editor of Obit-Mag.com
Don Davidson, CEO of the Huntsville, Alabama company Intellitar, thinks he can do one better. Intellitar launches the Virtual Eternity Service today, which creates a “digital image clone” of a user that can be interacted with in real time on the Internet even after the death of the clone’s creator.“Think of leaving yourself as a legacy,” Davidson told me in a phone interview yesterday. Simultaneously, I was staring at Davidson’s Intellitar (as in intelligent avatar) on my computer screen. The digital clone was blinking and fidgeting like a person might if trapped in the staid position of a studio portrait. “How are you today?” it (he?) asked me, mimicking Davidson’s stately southern accent in clipped tones.
The idea, (the real) Davidson continued, is to create a fully interactive clone of a person so that generations of family members and friends can ask questions about the deceased’s life, seek advice or just relive the indescribable feeling of talking to a loved one face-to-face.
The conversational artificial intelligence technology, developed by New Jersey-based Cognitive Code Corporation, was originally intended for use in a customer service capacity. Upload a training manual or a set of frequently asked questions and the A.I. accesses the appropriate information when prompted by a text or spoken question.
Davidson and his business partner Mike Remus figured that adding vocal and animation components to that A.I. structure could help answer that universal question of mortality: What am I leaving behind. With Intellitar, you are leaving yourself behind. Or some simulacra.
Davidson envisions multiple generations of families creating Intellitars together and constructing living family trees (Intellitars can’t talk to one another yet, so don’t worry about family squabbles lasting into eternity). “Genealogy starts at a point in time and goes backwards. Why can’t it start at a point and go forwards?” he asks.
The process for creating an Intellitar is simple. First, upload a portrait-style photo. Make sure it’s flattering, because this photo will become you, forever. Next, either choose among a dozen or so stock voices or spend three hours recording over 1500 phrases and sentences (which get broken down into phonemes) to create a signature voice. At this point you have created your Intellitar’s shell.
Then, you take a forty-question personality test to determine whether you are an extroverted, introverted or neutral person.
Finally, upload your life history in the form of an autobiography or through important stories, anecdotes or lessons. Populate video and photo galleries, offer commentary, do whatever you want really. As Davidson puts it, “train your brain.”
Obviously, you would have to do this before you die. And so the Virtual Eternity Service is a creative way of writing your own obituary.
The visual accomplishment of an actual Intellitar lands somewhere between the uncanny valley and those silly Conan O’Brien bits. So it can be a bit comical and eerie to interact with one. But, these Intellitars do display a comforting spark of life, a way of interacting that flipping through a scrapbook or reading old letters would never provide.
When asked who this product might appeal to, Davidson immediately mentioned Baby Boomers, which seems a logical audience for this type of self-preservation or self-worship.
But perhaps Intellitar will jell when two near parallel trajectories of technology and living intersect.
The storehouse of data about a person’s life is expanding almost exponentially and is no longer contained solely in journals, letters or picturebooks. Similarly, A.I. and virtual imaging improve ever-rapidly.
So imagine, in fifty years, when Millennials have decades of Facebook status updates, Foursquare check-ins AIM chats and tweets on record. They could upload their every move, thought and action since becoming sentient beings into a three-dimensional and potentially tactile hologram. The bereft would never again have to say goodbye.
Would this be some kind of afterlife or a just a cruel eternal return?
Davidson shrugs at such heady concepts. He is bullish on a more retrospective tradition: the transference of knowledge and history not through ever expanding databases and search engines, but through conversation, dialogue, story telling. The oral tradition.
Krishna Andavolu is the Managing Editor of Obit-Mag.com
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