When I spoke to my phone, my face appeared on the screen, and I said, 'Hi, my name is Robert, and I'm looking forward to telling you about my life.' I was talking to an AI avatar of myself, designed to allow people to'live on' after death so that relatives can talk to them and learn about their lives. My wife's reaction to my AI clone was absolute horror, as she simply said, 'My God, why?' The clone comes courtesy of a'digital afterlife' service, Hereafter.AI, part of a wave of AI-powered'grief tech' created by programmer James Vlahos after his father died of cancer in 2016. The service creates a'Legacy Avatar' that can live on after your death (Rob Waugh/Hereafter) Vlahos programmed a'Dadbot' while his father was still alive, recording his responses to questions - and Hereafter's service now uses AI to make it easier to interact. Science has unearthed several distinct patterns around when people tend to die.

When Sunshine Henle's mother, Linda, died unexpectedly at the age of 72, Henle, a 42-year-old Floridian, was left with what she describes as a "gaping hole of silence" in her life. Even though Linda had lived in New York, where she worked as a Sunday school teacher, the pair had kept in constant contact through phone calls and texting. "I always knew she was there, no matter what – if I was upset, or if I just needed to talk. She would always respond," says Henle. In November, Linda collapsed in her home and was unable to move. Henle's brother Sam and her sister-in-law Julie took her to urgent care.

In 2016, James Vlahos discovered that his father was dying from terminal lung cancer. Painfully aware that their time together was running out, Vlahos rushed to gather memories while he still could, recording his father's life story; everything from childhood memories to his favourite sayings, songs and jokes. Once transcribed, these recordings filled 200 single-spaced pages. "It was a great, but inert resource, and I longed for something interactive. So I spent nearly a year programming a chatbot replica of my father: the'Dadbot,'" said Vlahos.

It's January 17, 2020-- the world has yet to change; Wuhan locks down six days later -- and Emil Jimenez is on a train from Vienna to Prague. "She's like, 'Daddy,' y'know, 'what is this?'" Jimenez tells me on a video call from the Czech Republic. Jimenez tells her it's Siri, and encourages her to talk to the digital assistant. Her first question is if Siri has a mother. From there, she peppers the artificial intelligence with the kinds of questions kids ask -- do you like ice cream?

When Andrew Kaplan reminisces, his engrossing tales leave the impression that he's managed to pack multiple lives into a single existence: globe-trotting war correspondent in his 20s, a member of the Israeli army who fought in the Six-Day War, successful entrepreneur and, later, the author of numerous spy novels and Hollywood scripts. Now -- as the silver-haired 78-year-old unwinds with his wife of 39 years in a suburban oasis outside Palm Springs -- he has realized he would like his loved ones to have access to those stories, even when he's no longer alive to share them. Kaplan has agreed to become "AndyBot," a virtual person who will be immortalized in the cloud for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years. If all goes according to plan, future generations will be able to interact with him using mobile devices or voice computing platforms such as Amazon's Alexa, asking him questions, eliciting stories and drawing upon a lifetime's worth of advice long after his physical body is gone. Someday, Kaplan -- who playfully refers to himself as a "guinea pig" -- may be remembered as one of the world's first "digital humans."

Artificial intelligence and conversational computing platforms are no longer the sole domain of big businesses. Voice-computing technology can help a small or medium-sized business owner make interactions with customers more valuable. For one thing, voice computing technology can help improve customer service and efficiency by allowing customers to quickly and easily have a conversational experience with a business without the need for in-depth technical expertise. In the simplest terms, conversational computing is when you talk to a device and it talks back to you. Chris Messina, product designer and the inventor of the hashtag, has a bird eye's view of changes in the way we have conversations. We can use a variety of interfaces (voice, screen, messaging, etc.) and then carry the conversation to other interfaces without losing a beat or starting over.

Among patients and providers alike, bots are beginning to make their mark on healthcare. Supported by advancements in natural language processing and artificial intelligence, the technology is seeing an increasing variety of implementations. These range from text-based reception and customer service chatbots -- for instance Novo Nordisk's Sophia, which the company recently told MobiHealthNews has fielded more than 11,000 conversations and 27,000 questions since launching a few months back -- to the patient triage and symptom checking offered by Babylon Health and Buoy Health, respectively. But these aren't the only ways in which bots can play a role in care. At next month's Connected Health Conference in Boston, keynotes and roundtables will discuss novel uses for these technologies that could be feasible within the next several years. A terminal diagnosis is a burden for patients as well as their loved ones.

There's a moment in James Vlahos' piece--"A Son's Race to Give His Dying Father Immortality"--that made me tear up the first time I read it. Vlahos has just finished a prototype of a chatbot that speaks much like his father, who's dying of lung cancer. The system has been trained on hours and hours of recordings of the father's life story. It actually works, and now, after demonstrating it to his parents for the first time, Vlahos has a question for his dad. "Does it give you any comfort, or perhaps none--the idea that whenever it is that you shed this mortal coil, that there is something that can help tell your stories and knows your history?"

That is, he talks to the version of his father that lives on through Dadbot, an artificially intelligent chatbot he designed to retain his dad's experiences and personality. Vlahos documented his experience creating the chatbot in Wired magazine's August cover story, "Dadbot." The bot operates through Facebook Messenger, and it carries out conversations using John Vlahos's own stories and words. Before John Vlahos died -- at home in his sleep at the age of 81, surrounded by family on Feb. 17 -- he was able to interact with the bot himself.

James Vlahos lost his father John to lung cancer in February, but he still talks to him every week. That is, he talks to the version of his father that lives on through Dadbot, an artificially intelligent chatbot he designed to retain his dad's experiences and personality. "It either brings a smile to my face and a warm feeling sometimes, and at other times it brings a tear to my eye," the journalist from Berkeley, Calif., told As It Happens guest host Helen Mann. "It can make him feel closer sometimes, or I can be painfully aware that I'm talking to a computer program that I created that very clearly is not him." Vlahos documented his experience creating the chatbot in Wired magazine's August cover story, "Dadbot."