VietNamNet Bridge - A Vietnamese doctor has announced a new technological product which would allow people to talk with the virtual embodiment of a deceased person.

The virtual embodiment could be created by using information from the person's Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts. The virtual person would be able to talk with relatives and friends, thus helping them ease the pain of losing loved ones. 

A workshop on artificial intelligence (AI) titled ‘Fast track to AI applications’ took place late last week at BKUP Co-working Space of the Hanoi University of Technology.

At the workshop, three panel speakers and a group of research students presented  seven technology products, all of which are applications of AI in real life.

Dr Nguyen Tuan Duc, head of the research & development (R&D) division Alt Vietnam, and his co-workers, said that his project is in personal artificial intelligence, a branch of AI.

Duc revealed that under the project, a chatbot can be used to undertake some work instead of humans, such as answering emails and calls, scheduling and making decisions in some fields. 

Duc caught the audience’s special attention when saying that his team wants to use their technological product to build up the ‘virtual embodiment’ of the dead.

In order to create the virtual personality on smartphones, a huge mass of information and images from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google+ will need to be collected.

The idea raised by Duc reminded people of the story about Eugenia Kuyda, the CEO of Luka, a company that builds AI products. 

When her friend Roman Mazurenko suddenly died, she worked with her team to make a bot that replicates his speech patterns. The work has become well known worldwide.

At the workshop, participants also learned about projects which have been used in real life with initial success. 

These include a project on applying AI to solve the question in looking for parking lots by Nguyen Manh Hung, a lecturer at the University of Polytechnic University, and the project on using natural language processing technology by Le Hong Phuong from the Hanoi University of Natural Sciences, a member school of the Hanoi National University.

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