Many months ago Priscilla told me how some people combined voice samples with chatbots to keep talking with loved ones who had died, as a kind of therapy. The idea really stuck with her—not least because she knows my time may be limited one day.
Would you want your kids to hear the grandparent they never met narrate a documentary of where they came from?
Jonathan, my brother, recorded Chaim, one of our grandparents, before they passed. Chaim told the story of our family’s travels through Europe from the eve of the Second World War to an arrival in Albany, NY in 1950.
With the kind of data you can extract from letters, travel documents, photos, and meager voice samples, it may be possible to reconstruct a kind of version of this. Maybe you envision a Ken Burns–style narrative, or perhaps—for the attention span of social media—something more akin to a TikTok?
What are your thoughts on this?