Turkish entrepreneurs seek to achieve ‘immortality’ with Yourbot

ISTANBUL

Two Turkish-born businessmen have turned to crowdsourcing to help people achieve “digital immortality” through a robot that will allow one’s persona to continue living even after death.

With past experience in high tech software companies, Chad Özgür and Ekim Nazım Kaya say they decided to join forces for their mission to make memories and history accessible for all. Their project, Yourbot, is a device intended to blur the boundaries between the past, present and future, creating relationships crossing the barriers of time by employing linguistics, data processing and virtual intelligence.

Through years of research in collaboration with Princeton University, a team headed by Özgür and Kaya found a way to create complex, life-like digital personas by asking their real-life counterparts a series of questions spanning the whole of human experience. The aim is to enable people to talk to their late loved ones many years after they have passed away.
 
“If your great great grandchildren could have a chat with you, what would you want to tell them?” Kaya said. Unlike videos, photos or written records, Yourbot will provide “an interactive way to engage with the ancestors of today.”

In order to accomplish their ambitious goals, the duo have turned to crowdsourcing enterprise Kickstarter to raise their funding, aiming to hit $100,000 as an all-or-nothing project goal to realize their futuristic dreams.