AI & Grieving Series, Part 3: Eternos.Life
The third product in our series on AI application tools for the grieving process is Eternos.Life. Engineered specifically as a memorialization tool, Eternos.Life has the capacity to preserve unique spoken character traits and inflections and apply them in a spontaneous way in real time.
The service consists of audio and video recordings specifically created for the purpose of building the Eternos AI, along with other files like photos, documents, or additional electronic content which may be added to in an ongoing basis to be stored in the “Eternos cloud” in perpetuity. Whomever creates the account fully controls its access.
Real-time dialogue, unique responses
A key feature is that Eternos.Life’s actual, interactive AI persona based on your loved one generates impromptu responses in the voice of the deceased rather than playing back a pre-recorded series of unalterable videos. The result: a respectable imitation of real-time interactivity with the original through spontaneous dialog that changes with each conversation, sounding just like your loved one because it speaks in their recorded voice.
Here’s how it works: step one of the process involves your loved one – the subject – reading off and recording a list of several hundred phrases. From these spoken samples, Eternos.Life technology emulates the sound of their voice for relaying information from the content bank. When it later answers a question, it will speaks with the inflections and timbres of the real voice of the deceased.
Creating the bank of information to draw upon for answering questions posed in dialogue is the second step of the process. A database is built a loved one’s answering an extensive series of questions of all kinds. The resulting answers are later organized into chapters by subject, and filled with details and stories from the loved one’s life and experiences. This index of responses forms the database from which the subject’s voice will pull its answers when someone asks it a question.
In the end, Eternos.Life seems to work similarly to other generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity; the content it draws upon for its answers, though, is all based upon, and provided by, one person.
No free version was available on the Eternos.Life website to try out the service first-hand, so we can’t comment on whether the creation process is as painless as the company claims, but a few “demo” videos of people interacting with the service on their laptops were linked and embedded in the promotional material. There’s also a list of online articles.
For Memory, Not Processing
Eternos.Life, like StoryFile, is admirably sophisticated and technologically powerful in the quality of personal detail it undoubtedly preserves. It’s a highly specific type of tech, with its own role and purpose in the field of grieving.
Focused grief assistance from real professionals (in person or via telehealth) is clearly a different animal altogether: therapeutic counseling can supply guidance and support at the hands of trained professionals. SaaS technologies like Eternos.Life, on another hand, serve a rather niche function all their own, similar to scrapbooks and home movies. Each has its unique place in the modern landscape of navigating loss.
Eternos.Life is meant to help us remember and experience again some of the traces of a lost loved one, and it certainly appears effective in that role. It actually does look pretty cool. But while chatting with fancy, computerized versions of lost loved ones could well be part of a healthy grieving process, it also seems possible such tech might also contribute to avoidance and denial in some situations.
Mileage will vary, as it always does; for those with the budget, however, this service would probably be great — with a $5,000 USD initial fee (pus $500 annually thereafter), Eternos.Life is by far the most expensive option we’ve found so far. Maybe as the field grows pricing will become more competitive.
