Science/Tech

Chatbot Roman, Luka CEO's Digital Memorial Of A Friend [VIDEO]

By Alleah Kiamco | Update Date: Mar 15, 2017 09:23 PM EDT

Eugenia Kuyda, the CEO of Luka Messenger, made a digital monument of her best friend, Roman Mazurenko, where family members, friends and interested Luka users can talk and ask the Artifical Intelligence bot questions; questions which answer the way Roman would have responded if he was alive.

Kuyda, together with the help of AI developers, fed a neural network with thousands of text messages that represent Mazurenko. These messages are then formed to create Mazurenko's chatbox image in the Luka application, the CNN reports.

Luka can be downloaded in the App Store and features AI-powered chatbots to help the user pick places to eat, find interesting videos and plot out fun activities. It could also display varied choices of GIF's and trivia's. Now, it's slowly being developed to create a platform where dead people can be conversed with- Roman being an example of the start of its developments.

Kuyda said in an interview with The Verge that the new Luka feature allows users to feel as though they are communicating with the dead because it relays Mazurenko's actual messages when he was still alive. These responses generate the user and the AI's conversation.

This new technology has sparked mixed reactions from the online community and from the developers itself. Kuyda said that after seeing anonymous users post responses from the AI bot Roman, she felt a million emotions rush over her body. Some users find this new technology creepy for it's like straight out of the movies where the living can actually talk to the dead through a chat based software.

The Daily Mail have tried out the application and asked Roman where he is right now and the chatbot responded that it's next to their office. Aside from Roman, the feature to chat and ask Prince, the singer and songwriter, who died on April 2016, is made available too.

Kuyda said that she hopes to further this technology in the future and she is always up for the challenge to change and improve for the betterment of Luka's development.

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