![]() ![]() ![]() JOHN VLAHOS: (Singing) What will we do to the Stanfordites on that great day? We’ll celebrate them on that night after we play. JAMES VLAHOS: Dad, please sing me a song. In my camp, in the words of the Greek poet, I am just swell. (Reading) Life, I'm afraid, does not always allow you to take a breather. JAMES VLAHOS: And waiting for his message again. JAMES VLAHOS: I'm pretty busy right now, Dad. (Reading) Jamie (ph), I thought I smelled something suspicious in the air. I'm opening up Facebook Messenger, and I'll say. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Can we hear a little bit of some of the recordings you made with your dad? What do you know about your mom when she was a little girl in Greece? To be able to ask a chatbot all of these things and get answers, it just - it started to seem more and more worthwhile. But the ability to sort of have him, you know, tell me a story about when you were in college. And all of us in the family were sort of struggling with, how do we spend the last months that we have with him? How do we remember his story?Īnd it just seemed - you know, it seemed better than just having this giant binder full of his words that had been transcribed. JAMES VLAHOS: Well, I guess, I got to a point where (laughter) - this sounds like a cop-out answer - but better than nothing. GARCIA-NAVARRO: You weren't sure at first whether you should even do this, you wrote in the article. And you send him a message, and he sends you a message back. And then based on what the person says, that takes you to the next part of the conversation. And what it's listening for is all the ways that you can think of that that a user might react. GARCIA-NAVARRO: You had to type in all of your dad's possible answers? And you essentially - you put in a little piece of dialogue that you want your bot to say. Then I sat down with the computer conversation program. JAMES VLAHOS: So step by step, first, I had all the recording sessions with my dad to just get a full, robust version of his life story. GARCIA-NAVARRO: How does it work? How does the dadbot work? So it was really right around when we got my father's terrible diagnosis and had started just a conventional oral history project that it started to dawn on me that I could do something else as well, which was to create this bot. ![]() And the same company, to enable that, has made a program that lets basically someone like me, who does not have any kind of a coding background, craft one of these interactive conversational characters. And I sort of shadowed the process as they created this AI interactive version of the doll. JAMES VLAHOS: I think it all started, weirdly enough, when I was working on an article about a quest to make an artificially intelligent Barbie. GARCIA-NAVARRO: So when a loved one dies, we all kind of wish we could keep some part of them alive so we can turn to them for advice or comfort. And he joins us now from member station KUOW in Seattle. James Vlahos wrote about his dadbot (ph) for the August issue of Wired magazine. And then, after his dad passed away, Vlahos took all that material and put it into a software program that now lets him have actual conversations with his late father. Over several months, Vlahos spent hours and hours with his dad recording his life story. When James Vlahos' father was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer, he wondered if there would be a way to keep the essence of who his father was alive in case he died.
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