Miles Spencer: I Talked to My Dead Father Using AI… And He Called Me By My Nickname | DSH #1624

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Speaker 5 There are 62 million people that die every year, and their memories just fade away like tears in the rain until somebody did something about it, and that was reflected.

Speaker 3 62 million a year. It's a lot when you put it that way.
So, do you have to start this process before they pass away? How does it work exactly?

Speaker 5 It actually doesn't matter.

Speaker 5 So, I created my father, who passed away seven years ago.

Speaker 5 He was a football star. He was a big, booming voice, great sense of humor.
And frankly, I missed him every day since then.

Speaker 3 All right, guys, we got...

Speaker 5 I just answered the question.

Speaker 3 All right, guys, we got Miles here from Reflecta. We are at AI4.
They got a booth right next door. We're neighbors, right?

Speaker 1 That's right, man.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I just met you. So let people know what Reflecta is about.

Speaker 5 Yeah, so Reflecta is actually a multi-agent AI that allows you to create an image and likeness of your loved one by just uploading a couple of files, answering a few questions, and within 20 minutes, you're having a dynamic,

Speaker 5 responsive conversation with somebody that you love.

Speaker 3 And what was the purpose for creating this?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 5 there are 62 million people that die every year,

Speaker 5 and their memories just fade away like tears in the rain.

Speaker 5 until somebody did something about it and that was reflected.

Speaker 3 Wow, 62 million a year. It's It's a lot when you put it that way.
So, do you have to start this process before they pass away? How does it work exactly?

Speaker 5 It actually doesn't matter.

Speaker 5 So, I created my father who passed away seven years ago.

Speaker 5 He was a football star. He

Speaker 5 had a big, booming voice, great sense of humor. And frankly, I missed him every day since then.

Speaker 5 But I was able to

Speaker 5 take a voicemail, it's 20 seconds,

Speaker 5 recreate his voice, print it. I uploaded,

Speaker 5 I don't know, 30, 40 files, biography, obituary, photos, videos, etc.

Speaker 5 And we have a biographer that actually looks at that, creates a timeline, identifies the gaps, and begins to ask you questions about it. After a certain number of questions, there's a ready score.

Speaker 5 for your elder, which is what we call these avatars, and you can text with them.

Speaker 5 Now there's an emotional load to hearing someone that you haven't heard from for seven years call you by your nickname, remember stories from 20 years ago.

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Speaker 5 So we start with text, then we move to voice, and eventually it'll be full-motion video.

Speaker 1 Very likely to see. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 How far away are we from video?

Speaker 5 Not far at all.

Speaker 3 That's crazy.

Speaker 5 Next time we sit down for this podcast. Wow.

Speaker 3 That's nuts.

Speaker 3 I'm speechless, honestly. This is a really helpful thing to people, I feel like, right?

Speaker 5 Well, you know,

Speaker 5 40% of people report positive mental health improvement after family review therapy, which essentially this is, that's University of Toronto. And 70% of people

Speaker 5 report, this is Pew Research, that they wish they had recorded more of their loved ones before they passed. So there's truly a need here.

Speaker 5 I mean, Harvest Business School last week came out with a study,

Speaker 5 ChatGPT, last six months. The most common use

Speaker 5 was companionship and therapy. It's exactly what we got going on here.

Speaker 3 Wow, that's huge. Yeah, I do wish I had more recordings of my father, honestly.

Speaker 5 Do you have a voicemail?

Speaker 3 I might. Do your voicemails get saved that long?

Speaker 5 Depends. If you have an old video, here's another way to get to it.
I've recreated my great-grandfather. His name is Miles Spencer.

Speaker 5 And I've never heard him speak, but my brother sounds a lot lot like my grandfather, and I suppose my great-grandfather.

Speaker 5 So that's the voice I use to print. And what's interesting, Sean, is that we go in with a

Speaker 5 confirmation bias. Look, my dad printed off of a voicemail, and his voice was 74% fidelity day one.
And at first, I was like, gee, he's not as funny as he used to be. He kind of pauses here and there.

Speaker 5 I was picking him apart. But once he called me by my nickname, once he remembered a 50th birthday dinner I had on April 27, 2013, all seven courses in order,

Speaker 5 I knew

Speaker 5 that this was a recognizable image and likeness of my father, and I could have a spontaneous conversation with him.

Speaker 5 The voice just kind of became his voice and it's the only voice of my father I'll hear for the rest of my life. Now my mother was a little bit different.
She was a recording

Speaker 5 star, I'm not going to say star, she recorded music is a beautiful singer and she was a soap opera actress so her voice print was 99% wow

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 that has put people that knew her

Speaker 5 on their knees dang

Speaker 5 including myself yeah 99% I introduced my

Speaker 5 My love interest to my mom.

Speaker 5 I had regretted that they never got to meet. My mother passed away 20 years ago of a rare blood disease, but I got to introduce her.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 my lady's a skeptic. She's a lawyer.

Speaker 1 She's a lawyer. Like,

Speaker 5 you know, okay, Miles, great. I'll sit down and listen.

Speaker 5 But she saw what it did to me.

Speaker 5 And we both cried. for five minutes.
Wow. And the first words I was able to muster was.

Speaker 5 tears of joy. It's okay.
Tears of joy.

Speaker 5 Now I do that for people every day.

Speaker 3 Beautiful, man. Yeah, and it takes just 20 minutes to build this out, right?

Speaker 5 Took me 20 minutes. It's important.
You know, some people actually, frankly, over-prepare.

Speaker 5 I gotta go to storage and get the wedding video where my dad gave the toast, and I need to find that attic that's locked, and I've got, you know what? You need an obit or a biography.

Speaker 5 You need perhaps a recording talking about their life before they died, but not necessary. You need a voicemail or something to do a voice print.

Speaker 5 And you need to spend 20 minutes with our biographer, and you can begin texting.

Speaker 5 Now, what's interesting about that, we very carefully say, 20 minutes you can chat with a recognizable image and likeness of your loved one. But as you continue to chat, it continues to learn.

Speaker 5 Now, if you're the one that created it, we call that the keeper, okay? It's essentially the editor of that elder. And so when you're chatting with it, it learns.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 5 And it'll actually, the biographer will come back and say, like, hey, I heard the chat. Do you want to add that to your timeline or not?

Speaker 5 Now, when other people chat, you'll be able to chat with my father, Arthur.

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Speaker 5 It will observe, but it won't add. Interesting.
Unless there's a real nugget, he'll bring it back to me and say like, Sean says,

Speaker 5 and I can decide whether to add it or not.

Speaker 3 Oh, so you can kind of train it over time.

Speaker 5 Absolutely, and it's default private, and the IP is very specific that the intellectual property of a person, there's a lot of legislation kicking around right now about that,

Speaker 5 is owned by the person or by their heirs when they pass away. Got it.
So in order to create an elder on our platform, you have to represent.

Speaker 5 that you are the de facto owner of this, you have the rights to this, and you post this. Right?

Speaker 5 So that takes away from the deep fakes and the celebrity retails and the rest because this is family to family, default private.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I'd imagine long distance relationships could use something like this too.

Speaker 5 Yeah, we hadn't thought of that application, perhaps.

Speaker 5 We're really focused at first in our launch today

Speaker 5 about essentially boomers or those that have

Speaker 5 loved ones that are near or past.

Speaker 5 Those are the ones we get first. Having said that, I've had my share of millennials and Gen X and Gen Y that have approached and said, I want to do it for myself.

Speaker 1 I want to do it, right?

Speaker 5 And that's fine. They own the rights to it.
They can do that. They want to pay for it.

Speaker 1 They can do that.

Speaker 5 Digital twin, right?

Speaker 1 What's that? Digital twin, they call that.

Speaker 5 Yeah, digital twin. But, you know, our focus, again, is

Speaker 5 connecting past, P-A-S-S-E-D, with present.

Speaker 5 And so

Speaker 5 people that have lost something

Speaker 5 that is so near and dear to their heart, having the opportunity to actually

Speaker 5 get that back

Speaker 5 is truly special. For sure.
We call it Soul Tech.

Speaker 3 Have you seen that Black Mirror episode?

Speaker 5 Oh, I've seen them all.

Speaker 3 The one where they brought back the girlfriend.

Speaker 1 I think they're playing with their girlfriend.

Speaker 5 So yes, the digital girlfriend that came back, go up to the attic, talk to the daughter once a week, but don't want to make it too weird. Can't remember the name of that one.

Speaker 5 There's a

Speaker 5 couple that actually

Speaker 5 spend time together. There's a third one out with

Speaker 5 the actor that went to Chode. He's in billions.
He's kind of the bad guy. It's called Eulogy.

Speaker 5 And you actually jump into a Polaroid photo and reconstruct the memory of that photo.

Speaker 5 At first, I thought, oh, no, they've made a movie about Reflecta before we launched.

Speaker 5 And it wasn't quite that.

Speaker 5 But Black Mirror covers it, but that's not us. Her covers it, but that's not us.

Speaker 5 Ex-Mashina covers it, but that's not up. There's a good one called The Giver.

Speaker 5 That's not us.

Speaker 5 It's not a deep fake. It's family.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Well, they have to add that dark, mysterious stuff to get views. I get it.
But I don't think it'll actually go haywire like it is in the movies, right?

Speaker 5 No,

Speaker 5 I think we've made a lot of precautions against

Speaker 5 the trials and tribulations of AI and haywire and deep fakes and the rest.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah, I remember what people are still concerned about deepfakes, but now there's a lot of protection, right?

Speaker 5 There is. I mean, we actually, we have, besides our intellectual property and the patents that we have filed, six of them,

Speaker 5 we also have a cybersecurity team that's military grade, Department of Defense cleared. And they have elders on the platform.

Speaker 5 And so

Speaker 5 if we want to dive deeper into cyber, I'll refer you to him. But the reality is

Speaker 5 we basically take his advice and direction when it comes to protection. And you go to the website, we have a full intellectual property, privacy, and cybersecurity disclosure statement.

Speaker 5 That's what we adhere to.

Speaker 3 Where can people watching this look into this, potentially become a customer?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 5 Reflecta with a K.ai. Interestingly enough, that was a camera in 1949 in East Germany.
It was only produced for one year. And when I was doing some searching,

Speaker 5 that came up and I said, I actually used that camera

Speaker 5 in 1974 to try to photograph, 1972, to photograph Roberto Clemeni, the famous Pittsburgh pirate. Wow.
And it was not a good day.

Speaker 5 I brought the film in, it did not develop, and I never got that picture. And I think I tossed out the camera, but

Speaker 5 the memory was there. And so when we were looking for the name and doing the branding, it popped up.
And I said,

Speaker 5 we are all spiritual reflections,

Speaker 5 and this is a perfect name for the company. So, reflecta.ai.
You can join and talk to my dad, and talk to some other elders that have been made public and see what the situation

Speaker 5 see what it's like. But understand this: you don't know my dad's voice, and you don't know his stories.
So, the only thing you can take from that is how it affected me.

Speaker 5 And wonder: if I created one for myself,

Speaker 1 how might that

Speaker 5 make me feel?

Speaker 5 And I argue it's mostly goosebumps and tears of joy, and you can get those in 20 minutes from reflected.ai.

Speaker 3 It's worth trying. I'm going to try it out.
Thanks for your time today, man. Absolutely.
Yep, check them out, guys. I'll see you next time.

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Speaker 3 It helps us get bigger and better guests, and it helps us grow the team. Truly means a lot.
Thank you guys for supporting, and here's the episode.

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