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Humanity has long sought and failed to achieve immortality.
Now the age of AI has a solution. Something like.
Eternos is a startup that creates AI voice clones of people so that their loved ones can continue to interact with them after they die.
This is one of the most far-reaching uses of generative AI, a technology with wide-ranging applicability, since content generation to planning a summer trip, planning home renovations and baby cry translation. And as AI rapidly evolves, these use cases will only multiply.
After 18 years focused on business applications as CEO of conversational commerce platform LivePerson, Eternos founder Rob LoCascio wanted to give consumer services a shot. Specifically, he was thinking about the 76 million baby boomers in the US.
“It’s a large population and they’re thinking about longevity and health, and I believe they’re thinking about longevity in their legacy and their knowledge to pass on,” LoCascio said.
This led him to preserve the legacy – and Eternos was born in April.
Eternos works with customers to create what it calls a “digital legacy” and a “digital voice twin.”
Once the AI replica is created, loved ones can log into a portal and type in questions like “What was your favorite childhood memory?” in an interface that looks a lot like a traditional chatbot, such as ChatGPT or Gemini. In return, they receive both a written and an oral response.
Eternos can display letters, photos and videos in the user interface while the AI replica speaks, but the replica itself is static. You won’t see a video avatar of a loved one talking to you.
To create a digital voice twin, Eternos records each customer saying 300 training phrases such as “I love you” or “Close the door.” This captures what LoCascio calls “your emotional voice.”
The startup feeds this into an AI model to create a voice cue.
Eternos then tries to capture the breadth of the customer’s knowledge in a 150-question interview on topics such as memories, philosophies and even recipes, life hacks and final messages. Customers can tailor their questions to their experience—so, say, a musician might choose to focus additional content on music. Customers can add and/or change the content available to their AI twin at any time during its lifetime.
After capturing the voice and knowledge, loved ones can ask about personal experiences from the past, as well as advice or read a bedtime story.
“It does what we know about artificial intelligence today, where it can read a bedtime story and do it with characters and do all of that,” LoCascio said. “So there’s facts, there’s logic, there’s what I would call generative as part of the engines.”
Each AI replica is an individual model that was trained on data from that person. But AI immortality doesn’t come cheap. For now, it’s a one-time fee of $15,000, though LoCascio said the price will eventually drop.
“Right now, it takes a lot of GPU power to become a very high-end AI,” he said. “I wanted to keep the quality very high [rather] than to expose something that looks like you and then hallucinates and has all these problems.”
So far, Eternos has signed up 17 customers, with seven more that have expressed interest.
The company is privately funded and may eventually raise outside funding, but “we don’t need that right now,” LoCascio said.
This is one of a series of short profiles of AI startups to help you get to grips with the ongoing AI landscape. For more on AI, see our new AI atlas hub that includes product reviews, news, tips and explanations.
Editor’s note: CNET used an AI engine to help create several dozen stories that were labeled accordingly. The note you’re reading is attached to articles that deal essentially with the topic of AI, but were created entirely by our expert editors and writers. For more see our AI policy.
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