[vimy]

This is the story behind Replika.

"Three years ago, Kuyda hadn’t intended to make an emotional chatbot for the public. Instead, she’d created one as a “digital memorial” for her closest friend, Roman Mazurenko, who had died abruptly in a car accident in 2015. At the time, Kuyda had been building a messenger bot that could do things like make restaurant reservations. She used the basic infrastructure from her bot project to create something new, feeding her text messages with Mazurenko into a neural network and creating a bot in his likeness. The exercise was eye-opening. If Kuyda could make something that she could talk to—and that could talk back—almost like her friend then maybe, she realized, she could empower others to build something similar for themselves." https://www.wired.com/story/replika-open-source/

Or a more in depth read: https://www.theverge.com/a/luka-artificial-intelligence-memo...

You can talk with the deceased friend: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/roman-mazurenko/id958946383?...