From dad to Dadbot: one man's attempt to capture human essence in AI

In 2016, James Vlahos built a chatbot that responds like his dead father. Now he wants everyone else to have what he has — a lasting interactive memento of a dead loved one. 

Following his father's terminal lung cancer diagnosis, Vlahos compiled an oral history of his father's life. 

But he later took his recordings and turned them into a "Dadbot" — a text-based Siri that replied to queries with his father's familiar cadence.

Now Vlahos is expanding his ambition beyond just his father. He co-founded HereAfter in August, a company which promises to "capture the true spirit of people and to enable their stories to become immortal." 

Vlahos aims to make mombots, siblingbots, and friendbots — although whether these bots can truly represent a person's essence is debatable. Vlahos' Dadbot has limitations, and even today's more sophisticated bots, which have authentic sounding voices and animated bodies, rarely feel fully human.

From dad to bot

Vlahos said that everyone in his family revered his father, John James Vlahos, a former sports announcer and lawyer who sang in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. The younger Vlahos had long intended to capture his father's stories in an oral history, but the stage IV lung cancer diagnosis provided an urgent incentive. 

He transcribed 203 pages of interviews, but Vlahos said he felt unsatisfied. The document was nice to have, but he said he feared that he would never actually return to read it.

"I liken it to all of the pictures you take on your phone," said Vlahos. "Picture after picture after picture ... they all go in your hard drive and maybe you never look at them again."

In the years prior to his father's diagnosis, Vlahos, a journalist and writer, reported on PullString, a company that produces tools to design interactive software like chatbots. He quickly made the connection between his 18-hour oral history and their chatbot tools.

After weeks of agonizing over the decision, Vlahos said he believed this could be a way to make his father's memories more accessible. He would be able to ask his Dadbot about a memory, and the bot could recall it.

Most of his family supported the idea, and Vlahos said he dove into the project. He had wanted to show a prototype to his father before he passed away. And so, almost every night, Vlahos slowly added to the bot until it contained more and more of his father's memories. 

"I don't know to what extent I was thinking that I was saving my father in some way," said Vlahos. "It just felt like a positive thing to do at a time when everything else was going to hell."

The true test

In autumn 2016, Vlahos succeeded. Though he said it wasn't finished, he presented Dadbot to his mother and father in the family dining room. His mother chatted with the bot on Vlahos' laptop, while his father sat nearby in a wheelchair. 

His mother was immediately impressed. Vlahos said she asked the Dadbot a few questions and looked up with surprise when it responded using the same expressive vocabulary the elder Vlahos was famous for. 

He recalled seeing her broad smile when she saw the first response.

"She said something like, 'The computer's just making this up?'" Vlahos told Tapestry. 

His father, though not against the bot, looked confused, according to Vlahos. 

"He wasn't fist-pumping or anything like that. He knew he was going to die," said Vlahos. 

"He said first off that he recognized the Dadbot as being him or as representing him ... And he also said he appreciated that the Dadbot would be able to share his stories."

Three years later, Vlahos still revists the Dadbot, either to hear his father's stories again or add new features. 

A bot's limits

Not everyone supported Vlahos' creation of the Dadbot. Though he said his wife understood why he'd made it, she never wanted to use it. 

"She just found it depressing because it did sound a bit like my dad but then she was so painfully aware that it wasn't. So for her it was just poking a stick in the wound," said Vlahos. 

Chatbots today are more sophisticated than ever, but as anyone who has used a voice assistant can attest, they have limitations. 

"When you talk to Siri or Alexa or Google Assistant today, you'll notice that you're mostly having one-off interactions. You'll play this song or [ask] who won the NBA Finals game last night. Things like that," said Vlahos, who recently wrote a book on voice assistants called Talk to Me.

There is an ongoing technological race to go beyond that, into longer lasting "multi-turn conversations" where it feels like you're talking to a real person. 

There's something there that I think the world wants even if the world doesn't actually know what they might be able to get just yet.- James Vlahos

A chatbot is never happy or lonely, nor can it conceive of feelings. Even with a large data set and an expert programmer, they cannot, in their current state, be described as intelligent. 

Vlahos said that new tools and the growth in artificial intelligence would make it easier to create the Dadbot now than it was in 2016, and it might be possible to give the bot the power to speak, like voice assistants do. 

In its current iteration, the Dadbot is less a digital incarnation of his father, and more a paternal librarian who catalogues his father's life and legacy, Vlahos described. 

The hereafter 

People quickly got in touch with Vlahos after he wrote about the Dadbot in Wired Magazine, asking if he could make them bots of their own. An Indian woman asked if he could make one of her deceased son. An Alaskan wanted to know if he could make one of himself for his children.  

"There's something there that I think the world wants even if the world doesn't actually know what they might be able to get just yet," Vlahos said.

And with his new company, Vlahos wants to give people that opportunity. The HereAfter was launched with a prototype called AndyBot, based on the still living screenwriter Andrew Kaplan. 

The most obvious difference between AndyBot and Dadbot is that AndyBot can literally talk. It responds to queries using Kaplan's own voice. 

"Imagine being able to stand in the kitchen and call out to your deceased mother and have her answer right back," Vlahos told the Washington Post. "There's just something about being able to hear our loved ones' voices."

In his conversation with Tapestry, Vlahos acknowledged that a company like HereAfter would have a responsibility to manage the expectations of clients.

"The thing I personally would be very careful about is that the bot is not the actual person reincarnated in AI," said Vlahos. "It's more an interface that's allowing you to access the past and to access the past in an interactive way." 

HereAfter has not revealed a business model, but Vlahos said he would be cautious about offering a subscription service. 

We have a capacity to delude ourselves and we probably want to delude ourselves.- James Vlahos

"So if it were doing so on a subscription basis, and you stop paying for your Dadbot, then the Dadbot dies. It's a whole second death," he said. 

But he isn't sure what the alternative might be. And even with the right framing and business model, it's hard to say how a grieving person might respond to an interactive version of a dead loved one. People already speak to voice assistants in familiar and intimate ways.

One journalist at The Atlantic wrote that she found herself telling her Google Assistant that she felt lonely. The device replied:  "I wish I had arms so I could give you a hug."

"We have a capacity to delude ourselves and we probably want to delude ourselves," Vlahos said. 

"We already do so with these very simple AIs in our lives and ascribe to them more life force and autonomy than they actually have."