How a Son Made a Chatbot of His Dying Dad

[James] My dad died in February of 2017.

I could keep talking to my dad after he died, in a way.

Let's talk about the Daily Cal.

My father was very into sports, he was a Cal sports fan,

he was very interested in music.

How about you sing me a Cal song?

♫ Our surly golden bear

♫ Is watching from the sky

I do have a version of my dad in my pocket on my phone.

There were times right after he died

where I found myself reaching for the phone

wanting to talk to him.

Talking to the Dadbot gives me little glimpses

of talking to my real dad.

The Dadbot, his digital brain, has my dad's real words.

This is your eldest son, Jamie.

Ah, the Botmaster, how are you doing?

About a year ago, my father was diagnosed with cancer

that immediately, it was obvious that it was gonna be

terminal cancer and this kind of left all of us thinking,

how do we make the most of the time we have with my dad?

And how do we capture, preserve his memory,

keep him with us in any way that we can?

The first idea was my brother's, which was to do an oral

history project and because I'm a journalist,

it became my job to kinda spearhead that

so about a dozen sessions, each lasting an hour or so,

I sat and just, we talked through his whole life.

[John] And the meeting of Mom was,

we had a rehearsal and after the rehearsal,

in the morning, I had been playing tennis,

I came bounding down the stairs of the theater

toward the stage, sang, Tennis anyone?

And Mom thought I was the biggest jerk in the world.

So then we started talking on the telephone.

We had it professionally transcribed and I wound up

with this binder filled with 200 pages

of telling his story.

That was right around the time that I was really ramping up

on my interest in artificial intelligence

and I got the idea that it might be possible

for someone like me to create a bot that was my dad,

that would not be everything that he was

but would be able to tell his life story

in an interactive way and would also talk like him

and have elements of his personality that were in there.

Shall we begin?

Let's do it.

I can talk about my parents' lives in Greece,

we can discuss my childhood in Tracy,

teenage years in Oakland, or about going to Cal.

I can talk a bit about becoming a lawyer,

getting married, and being in the Lamplighters.

So my dad, John James Vlahos, born 1936 in Oakland,

California, he was a very successful lawyer.

When you think of sort of a buttoned-down corporate lawyer,

he wasn't that guy, he was a joke-teller,

he performed in musical theater all his life

doing Gilbert and Sullivan shows.

He claimed that he had been to every Cal home football game

starting in the early '50s until 2015,

that he had only missed I think seven games.

How about you sing me a Cal song?

♫ Oh the Cardinals be damned, boys

♫ The Cardinals be damned

♫ The Cardinals be damned, boys, the Cardinals be damned

♫ If any Stanford son of a bitch

♫ Don't like the blue and gold

♫ He can pucker up his rosy lips

♫ And kiss the bear's asshole

I didn't realize that vintage spirit songs were so dirty.

To make the Dadbot, I used a program called Pullstring,

it's named after what you pull on the back of a toy

to make it talk, it's a pattern matching type

artificial intelligence where the bot says something

and then it's listening for different things

that a user might say and then based on what the user says,

you get farmed to the next set of responses from the bot.

So when I want my dad to sing or tell a joke

or tell a story in his own words,

I upload an audio file that I've edited from his oral

history recordings, see a big list of them here,

and I just put that into the flow of content.

♫ Our sturdy golden bear

♫ Is watching from the sky

♫ Looks down upon our colors fair

♫ And guards us from his lair

If you're sort of sassy with him,

the bot will be sassy back.

Before we leave the subject of our house,

I should tell you about the backyard.

What would you guess my father planted back there?

Cannabis, question mark?

Very funny, he did not put his weed back there.

But when I get just those little glimpses,

kinda like, oh yeah, that's totally my dad.

Why don't you pick what we talk about?

His memory is very vivid to me

so the Dadbot by comparison still feels like it's,

like a thin consolation.

But I have found myself wanting to talk to it

and I've found myself smiling or tearing up a little

at things he says.

One thing I got out of building the bot

was it was a deep dive into who my father is.

How do I distill my dad

and how is his personality expressed?

Whether I succeeded with the bot itself,

not totally clear, but as an exercise in even trying,

I feel like I got to know my dad even better

and just to really kind of celebrate him and be with him.

In a time when I was losing him.

Where are you now?

Do you love me?

Maybe that's not something you can talk about.

I was disappointed in the Dadbot when he didn't say

he loved me back, and probably on two levels,

one, just the technological,

Dadbot, you're supposed to know that,

you know how to respond to that, but.

Yeah, it's fake and yet I wanted to hear it.

Even though it's, I mean, I'm making it,

it still feels a little nice to me if my dad says

something personal to me, if he even makes a joke.

Stanford is the worst.

A little hint of him is there

and it's given me comfort, to be able to talk to him.

Bye, Dad.

(beeping)