Welcome back everyone to cheddar innovates, brought to you by curiosity stream.
I'm Chloe Aiello here in new york,
artificial intelligence technology impacts our lives in so many ways
and now things are getting even more personal here after a
I is an Ai platform that saves your family history and
story and allows you to interact with your loved ones.
Once again,
joining us now is James Vlahos, co founder and Ceo of Hereafter.
Ai James, thank you so much for joining us today.
Can you walk us through the user experience of this? What's it like to use hereafter
for sure and thanks for having me on.
So, the goal of what we're doing here is reinventing remembrance.
So you got to think of what we've always done,
which is to take memories and lock them away in digital photo albums or
lung recordings were trying to transform this
from being static into being interactive.
So imagine you pull out our app, you it's a grandmother, she wants to save stories,
she's getting interviewed through that app, She talks all about her life,
her childhood, her career, her loves her interests.
Then whether it's days or months or decades later,
say it's her granddaughter who wants to learn all about grandma.
She either talking to a smart speaker, talking to our app,
asks life story questions,
here's her grandmother's actual voice sharing those stories,
sharing those memories and seeing photos at the same time.
This idea actually comes from your own personal experience.
So how did you get the idea for hereafter?
This was a few years ago and my father very sadly, I had gotten terminal lung cancer
and I did a conventional oral history project with him,
just recording hours and hours of him talking all about his life.
And I was working at that time on a book about
conversational artificial intelligence and I just kind of realized like,
huh, maybe all this recording all this knowledge,
all these memories I have of my dad who I loved so much,
maybe I could find a new interactive way to present that
to people and not just have it be locked away.
So that became the basis for something that I called the dad bod,
which was a chat bot that represented him.
And that in turn was the inspiration for launching here after
a I so that everybody could have something similar for remembrance.
That's so incredible.
Now, what exactly is personal Ai? And what does this concept look like?
Perhaps in the future
if you're thinking about, like if you've spoken with the computer at all,
it's probably, you know Siri or Alexa or assistant, something like that,
and this is this one size digital, one size fits all digital being, you know,
we all talk to the same thing.
So personal Ai is the exact opposite.
It's an Ai that represents you, it's your voice, your knowledge,
your way of speaking,
it's directly sourced to a real person
and we've seen celebrities preserve their stories with Ai,
how are you making this accessible for everyday people?
Yeah, there's some there's been some really interesting projects in that space,
but if you look at them, these are things that took, you know,
months to bring to fruition, cost tens of thousands,
if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to create.
So the fundamental difference here is here after
a i has a platform where you me anyone
for less than $100 and in a matter of hours can begin creating a life story avatar.
So it's really democratizing this idea of a personal Ai
now, how are people reacting to using this technology so far?
You know, even I would be the first admit that the technology has a long way to go
before it becomes like what we're expecting
from what we've seen in science fiction.
But even in its early form, the first time that somebody, you know,
speaks to the hereafter of mom and dad or whoever it is,
they hear the actual voice of a loved one.
It's it's a magical experience because we are used
to just sort of these cookie cutter a eyes.
Um and then there's just that hearing of
stories that maybe you've heard this story before,
maybe you haven't, we don't get into kind of deep, you know,
tell me all about the background of your life conversations day to day.
So just it's it's a connection for people to hear the voice,
hear the stories that they may not know.
I absolutely believe that
now.
What are your plans for growth and how do you see the company evolving over the years,
we're obviously shooting for the stars and at the low end,
I would love to see this become at least as big as something like ancestry dot com or 23
me a family history technology company and on the high end, whether it's us,
whether it's another company doing this,
um that personal avatars become something on par with social networking, it's just
ubiquitous, almost unquestioned that like, oh yeah of course,
like I've got my avatar,
wow, that's so interesting, Can you go into that a little bit more, you know,
what might that look like in practice, you know,
mixed with this hereafter technology, is this person interacting like a loved one?
Is it you yourself building an avatar, what would that look like?
Yeah, you you build it yourself and you know,
one of our key beliefs as a company is that these things don't get built by accident,
you're not just gonna take everything you've
posted on twitter or facebook before kind
of vacuum it up and that builds the perfect day I of you,
there has to be some process where like we've built a
virtual interviewer that asked these deeper questions about your life,
he talks about the emotions of your life, your ambitions, your failures,
whatever it is, like really kind of gets into it.
So first it has to the knowledge has to be acquired to build,
build a high quality avatar.
But from there you can see it going in any number of directions.
So we're obviously thinking of this Memorial ization idea but you can imagine
in professional settings where you want some
representation of yourself and your resume,
you can imagine using it in gaming in some format where like I
want to have a character in the game that's really based on me.
So there's any number of directions you could go once you have this true to life,
life story avatar of yourself, so many applications.
And finally,
what other technology and innovation are you watching in the industry
that can change the way we think about preserving memories.
I'm just really watching.
There's within this little realm that I'm in,
there's kind of a debate like what form does it take?
And is this sort of just a talking time capsule that presents videos and audio
and photos and it understands the questions you're
asking or are we really talking about?
We want to build,
you know,
the holographic avatar that you either see in front of you taking some
presence in the room in an augmented reality style or in virtual reality.
And that's,
I would say that's an unsettled debate even
if we could create those perfect holograms,
do we necessarily want them?
Or is that creepy?
That's different people have different strong opinions about that.
Absolutely.
And I'm so interested in these conversations because it sounds like a sci fi movie,
but it's almost here.
James. Thank you so much for sharing this with us.
That's James, Vlahos, co founder and Ceo of Hereafter Ai.