When a loved one dies, for many the realisation that they will never again have a conversation again is the hardest thing to process. 

It now seems that AI has a solution to that - sort of. 

Justin Harrison is a tech entrepreneur and founder of You Only Virtual, a company that builds AI chat bots for the bereaved. 

On Moncrieff, he explained that he built one for himself when he learned his mother was about to pass away.  

 “What I realised was the most important thing was going to be how she said things to me,” he said. 

“There’s a way mothers and fathers say something to you that is so meaningful and important. 

“And that’s really what we look at. 

“So, we add the facts and we add the interesting things, the titbits. 

“But the most important thing is, do we communicate the same way that we always did?” 

Mr Harrison described his mother as a “cheerleader” for the project - but the chatbots do not need your relative’s consent to be made. 

“She did all the recordings and all that stuff,” he said. 

“We’ve actually refined the technology down, so that you can do it before somebody passes away, after somebody passes away. 

“It doesn’t really matter the timeframe, you just need 30 seconds of a voice sample and your memories at this point.”

Main image: A funeral. Picture by: Kzenon / Alamy.com.