He adds that while the chatbot didn’t remove the pain of his dad’s death, it does gives him “more than I otherwise would have”. “It’s not him retreating into this very fuzzy memory. I have this wonderful interactive compendium I can turn to.”
While users of HearafterAI can upload photos of their loved one, to appear on the screen of their smart phone or computer when they use the app, another firm that turns people into AI chatbots goes much further.
The grief tech sector, also called “death tech”, is now valued at more than £100bn globally, according to tech news website TechRound.
This growth was fuelled by the coronavirus pandemic, says David Soffer, its editor-in-chief.
“What Covid did was highlight to people the importance of life,” he says, stressing that it helped break down some of the taboos around talking about death. This in turn led to us increasingly accepting tech as a part of the grieving process.
