What if you could have “eternal digital life”? This was made possible by the start-up company Intellitar, which created a service allowing customers to generate digital avatars of themselves that loved ones could interact with long after the persons’ death. “Customers uploaded a photo of themselves to Intellitar’s ‘Virtual Eternity’ website, took a personality test, provided a voice sample and then trained their avatars’ ‘brains’—an artificial-intelligence engine—by feeding it stories, memories and photos.”
The company was not successful and shut down in 2012. According co-founder and former CEO of Intellitar, Don Davidson, the company’s failure was because of an expensive legal dispute. One other company, Eterni.me, is working on a similar service but the technology is “still in its infancy.”
See Kashmir Hill, This Start-Up Promised 10,000 People Eternal Digital Life—Then It Died, Fusion, Apr. 9, 2015.
