Pamela Cruz. Peninsula 360 Press [P360P].
In the style of the fictional series "Black Mirror", Microsoft has patented a technology, created by its developers, which would make it possible to have a virtual conversation with a person who has died, or so it is believed.
The patent, filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, details a method for creating a "chatbot" to converse with a specific person: a "past or present entity ... such as a friend, family member, acquaintance, celebrity, fictional character or historical figure."
In theory, the tool would make it possible to chat about music with David Bowie, or politics with Winston Churchill. However pregnancy, this technology will not see the light, at least for the moment, because the company does not plan to turn the technology into a real product, CNN said in a news release.
Microsoft's general manager of artificial intelligence programs, Tim O'Brien, said in a tweet last Friday, "confirmed there is no plan for this."
According to the patent, the tool would select "social data" such as images, social media posts, messages, voice data and written letters from the chosen person, which would be used to train a chatbot to "converse and interact in the specific person's personality."
These interactions could also rely on external data sources, in case the user asked the bot a question that could not be answered based on the person's social data.
"Conversing about a specific person's personality may include determining and/or using the specific person's conversational attributes, such as style, diction, tone, voice, intent, sentence/dialogue length and complexity, topic, and coherence," as well as using behavioral attributes such as interests and opinions and demographic information such as age, gender, and profession, the patent states.
Similarly, in some cases, the tool could even be used to apply facial and voice recognition algorithms to recordings, images and videos to create a tone and a 2D or 3D model of the person to enhance the chatbot.
