Anyone who has seen the Black Mirror episode 'Be Right Back' will have grappled with the idea of using technology to bring a loved one back to life.
Now, in a clear case of life imitating art, a company in California has announced it is working on an Alexa-style "bot" that will let people talk friends and relatives after they die.
Here After uses voice recordings made before you die to create the bot. Loved ones can then can talk, joke and reminisce with the bot, as if you are still alive.
The company begins by conducting interviews with clients, in which they are encouraged to talk about their lives, The Times reports.
Their responses are then edited, categorised and divided into sections such as "falling in love" or sentiments such as "happy" or "story about stressful moment".
This data is transferred to an app, which friends and family can access via a phone or smart speaker.
The system uses artificial intelligence to construct suitable responses to questions and commands, in a similar way to Amazon's Alexa or Google Assistant.
So, for example, you could say, "Mum, tell me about the day of your wedding" and your late mother's voice would narrate her memories.
While many families already record elderly relatives' memories for posterity, James Vlahos, co-founder of Here After, told The Times that such recordings are often too long and cumbersome.
"Recording dozens of hours of my dad talking and telling his life story means it is just a giant audio file, and it becomes effectively inaccessible because nobody is sitting down to listen to that," Vlahos said.
"So this is using the power of conversational artificial intelligence to be able to just grab a story, a reminiscence, a joke, a song."
He added that Here After it is making sure it records small talk and words like "hello" and "goodnight", to make the conversations more natural.
Vlahos claims that several hundred people have already joined Here After's waiting list.
Users will pay upfront to receive all of the recordings in bulk form, but can also pay a monthly subscription to use the AI conversational tool.
Eventually, Vlahos hopes that the app will automate the interview process, enabling customers to record memories in their own time.
Here After isn't the service catering to this market.
Another startup, called Eterni.me, is working to create animated conversational avatars of clients by collecting and processing data from their social media profiles.
More than 45,000 people have signed up to a beta test from Eterni.me, and it has been named by the V&A as one of the top 100 projects that will shape the future.
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