CIOIN

Future Tech People who die in Hollywood movies often find themselves floating around on a cloud as angels. Now a startup in Huntsville, Alabama, will let you go to a different kind of cloud after you die: The computing kind.

The two-year-old company, called Intellitar, lets people create intelligent avatars or "intellitars" of themselves now, so they can spend time with their ancestors forever. The avatars are designed to look and talk like their creators, who stock their virtual selves with information to pass on to future generations through virtual conversations.

"We've become accustomed to archiving many things: Pictures, video, documents, recordings ... why not archive yourself?" said Don Davidson, CEO and co-founder of Intellitar.

Conversing with ancestors is an age-old dream. Intellitar is bringing this quest into the Facebook era, letting people represent themselves in the virtual afterlife. Instead of trances and spells, Virtual Eternity uses a combination of text-to-speech technology, artificial intelligence and animation tools, all running on the Rackspace cloud-computing infrastructure.

To create an intellitar, a user sets up an account, uploads a single digital portrait photo, and adds information by answering pre-designed questions and submitting text.

To make the avatar speak, Intellitar offers a selection of prepared digital voices. These are standard voices created by professional voice artists who speak a long series of words and phrases. The recordings can be broken down and then re-combined into whatever the avatar wants to say, Davidson said.
If the idea of your late grandmother speaking to you in the voice of a well-trained stranger is less than heartwarming, Intellitar plans to offer a tool that will let your grandmother train the avatar in her own voice.

Compiling information about family members digitally, and maintaining it in a cloud, has advantages over simply storing old papers, tapes and discs.