Marketplace Tech With Molly Wood

This story was produced by our colleagues at the BBC.Lottie Hayton lost both her parents within two months of each other. As a young journalist she wanted to write about it, and in particular to investigate a new tech genre known as “grief tech,” or “ghostbots”.An industry is emerging that uses artificial intelligence to build chatbots of people who’ve died with the aim of offering solace to those who’ve lost loved ones.Hayton made a chatbot version of her dad and a visual talking avatar of her mom.“My drive to try it was, I guess, in order to provide other people who might be using it with information,” said Hayton.“The bot sort of blinks and moves slightly like she did, that was quite alarming. The face moves in a juddery way but it very much looked like her and that threw me off,” she added. “It had an air of her, but it was definitely robotic. I was inherently aware that this was a piece of technology.”Within the last five years, the idea of digital resurrections have gone from science fiction to reality.